BETWEEN XIX AND XX CENTURY

Palaces and mountain huts for Gottfried Hofer exhibition in Campiglio

by Giovanna Recusani
editor of the exhibition

 

The fortunes of Madonna di Campiglio owe a lot to Gottfried Hofer, versatile and enterprising artist who intertwined his personal life, with the one of the nobles of his time. This plot, among art, worldliness, and love for the mountains,
tries to illustrate the exhibition that Madonna di Campiglio is hosting between July and August, and that is dedicated to the canvas, frescos and photographs by the Central European artist.
On this occasion, the Salone Hofer (Hofer Hall), attached to the Des Alpes Hotel, opens the doors to the visitors who can admire the frescoes picturing the famous faces of the Habsburg, including Pincess Sissi, framed by flower decorations, typical of that time.
The brightness of the colours, perfectly preserved, was obtained by a mixture of tempera and casein and by the effect of the sorrounding colour, that contrasts with the decorations at the back.
The exhibition takes place in many different spots like the Capanna Hofer (Hofer Hut) on Mount Spinale, near the cableway arrival, and the Palazzo dei Congressi di Campiglio (Campiglio Congress Hall).
The Capanna Hofer will again be for a short length of time, the high mountain artist’s atelier where, next to the easel and his work tools, we can see a documentary on his life and works. At Palazzo dei Congressi there are many unseen works, among drawings, sketches, pictures, studio and documentation photographs, found both in Val Rendena and abroad, in private collections and museums.
Born in Bolzano in 1858, Hofer lived between Paris and Rome, Bremen and Berlin; in Madonna di Campiglio he spent many summers and it is here where he wrote some of the most beautiful pages of his artistic life that this exhibition allows us to get to know for the first time in a deep and very articulated way.
His love for Campiglio led him to accept the assignment to become President of the “Società dell’Abbellimento”, a sort of forerunner Tourism Office, beside leaving an extraordinary iconographic documentation on nature in the Dolomites and in Val Rendena.
The exhibition section held at Palazzo dei Congressi is exactly on the history of tourism development, which had started from him, as a social, economic and cultural phenomenon, seen through the building of great hotels and the local image spread throughout Europe with the first printed guides. The retrospective eye of the event lingers on the transformation of Campiglio from a medioeval pilgrim hospice into a high standard touristic resort, thanks to pioneers such as Giambattista Righi, the Oesterreichers, the Neumanns and the Ferrazzas.
Educated as an academic painter in Munich, between 1876 and 1883, Hofer walked along the compulsory stages for all artists of his time: Pompei, Capri, Venice and Rome.
He received a bronze medal at the Universal Exhibition af Arts in Paris in 1889 thanks to a landscape work named “Pescatori nella Laguna” (Fishers in the Lagoon), today at the Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck.
He got close to issues and expression- tecniques of a group of artists called the German-Romans, i.e. Fuerbach, Hildebrand, Marees and above all, Boecklin. The impressionist influences absorbed during his stay in Paris, reveal themselves mainly in the landscapes, while in the official portraits Hofer keeps his initial academic inprinting.
In Campiglio, the artist reconciled his technical and academic nature with the joy of his “Jugendstil” ( a German artistic movement to which he got close for a while).
This creative enterprise can be observed in the canvas but, above all, on the walls of the dining room of the Grand Hotel Des Alpes, which is a pictorial cycle in which the artist expressed at best his talent: the characters of nobility are blended in on the walls with the mythological quotations and representations of the sorrounding alpine nature. Here the painter recalls, among other things, the world of the Greek gods: here we have the nimph Echo between a bilberry and a rhododendron.
For this artistic qualities and the historical documentation the hall Des Alpes has been recently declared by the “Sovrintendenza ai Beni Artistici e Culturali”, “cultural heritage of peculiar importance”: the property allows the access to the public only during the exhibition, a rare and appreciable occasion indeed.