In the last phase of his life, his works almost verged on Expressionism, with strong colors and barely suggested, abstracted settings. In particular, he developed a style called Parallelism, in which groups of figures are symmetrically arranged almost geometrically across the canvas, in poses suggesting dance or ritual.
His final works also showed strong emotional reactions not only to the slow, painful death due to cancer in 1915 of his mistress, Valentine Godé-Darel, but also to the simultaneous ghastly horrors of WWI.
He left a significant number of unfinished works.
Hodler's most renowned works include "Night":
And "Day":
Other important canvases in a similar vein include "Truth":
And other works:
His particular penchant for showing women with long dresses adhering to their legs appears again and again, as well as for depicting women with elongated necks in hieratic poses:
Whereas his masterful, subtle modeling of the body, is revealed in a number of other works and sketches:
Most powerful is a large, unfinished anti-war piece, in which the figures are about one-half life-size. It is an almost Expressionistic canvases, depicting the Greek Goddess of Discord, Eris, holding the black Apple of Discord, a kind of Angel of Death figure flanked by two nude warriors, of different races, with an apparently dead baby at their feet. In this work, the artist betrays the fullest, darkest rage and despair at the ravages of human madness:
Although the actions of the bodies display similar iconography, here in the above work, a reaction to the brutal actualities of war, we see a stark contrast to earlier works, public murals, in which he glorified historic warfare as patriotic defense:
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