Auguste de Niederhäusern (Rodo) (1863−1913)

Rodo left Geneva in 1886 after receiving basic artistic training there and moved to Paris in order to attend courses at the Ecole nationale des beaux-arts and the Académie Julian. Four years later, inspired by a journey in central Switzerland, he began work in Paris on a huge composition titled Le Poème alpestre (Alpine Poem). This was to comprise three large high reliefs – Avalanche, Cascade and Torrent – and several bas-reliefs, all of which he initially wanted to carve from a mountain. In February and March 1891, the artist showed plaster models of Avalanche and Cascade at an exhibition in Geneva, describing Avalanche to a member of the editorial staff of the Journal de Genève: ‘The woman […], an evil fairy, roves from mountain to mountain. […] then she suddenly holds on to the splinters of rock, feels for the snow with her foot of steel and, driven by a will to destruction, sets the avalanche rolling. That will appears on this sphere as a figure with arms extended and armed with knives, hastening to mow down everything and crush it.’

That May, Avalanche was exhibited in Paris at the recently founded Société nationale des beaux-arts and also reproduced in the catalogue – a rare honour for a young sculptor. The following year, Auguste Rodin, a founding member of the Société, took Rodo on as a studio assistant. Rodo showed Avalanche in Brussels in 1892 and in Bern in 1894, where it elicited a very positive response from the daily Der Bund: ‘It represents a highly original attempt to conquer new territory for plastic art, beyond the rather boring academic rules, and a strong, poetically inspired imagination.’ Yet Rodo looked in vain for someone to commission a version in marble and in 1896 turned to work on a monument to the poet Paul Verlaine. A public commission took him in 1898 to Bern. Deep in debt, he eventually turned his back on the city in 1904, leaving behind the plaster Avalanche in his studio. The director of the Kunstmuseum saved it from destruction and it is now the only surviving part of Le Poème alpestre. [...]

Source: Masterpieces Kunstmuseum Bern, Ed. Matthias Frehner / Valentina Locatelli, München: Hirmer Publishers, 2016, Cat. No 47, p. 122 (author: Claude Lapaire)