Portraits of the World: Switzerland

“Portraits of the World: Switzerland” is the inaugural exhibition of a series that will highlight the global context of American portraiture. Each year, the National Portrait Gallery will showcase a portrait created by an international artist affiliated with the lending country. The featured work for 2017-18 is Femme en Extase, a portrait of the Italian dancer Giulia Leonardi by the great Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler, on loan from the Museum of Art and History in Geneva. Hodler’s experimentation with the abstract elements of color, line and expression created a vibrant new mode of Swiss art at the dawn of the twentieth century.