Viewed from today’s vantage point, Heinrich Danioth’s Kehlengletscher – a painting of the Uri Alps – can be seen as a memorial to a glacier that has retreated at an alarming rate over the past century. All that remains today is a measly 1.7 square metres, just half the amount of ice that still existed in 1970. Yet in Danioth’s work, produced in his youth, it appears in all its majestic glory. At a time when the artist was still very much inspired by Hodler’s Symbolist principles, he was already showing his dual interest in modernity and in ancestral myths and traditions, tinged with a mysticism brought about by the stunning spectacle of the Alps. His fascination with his home canton’s wild landscapes and the lives of its people – almost to the exclusion of all else – has seen him often unfairly relegated to the status of a local painter. Danioth is somewhat forgotten nowadays: he is less well-known than the red devil and goat he painted on the rock face above the Teufelsbrücke (Devil’s Bridge) – a sight familiar to every tourist but whose modernism repulsed the people of Uri in 1950.

Heinrich Danioth (1896–1953) was born in Altdorf, Uri Canton. He trained in Basel under Rudolf Löw and Rudolf Mayer. Danioth was influenced by Ferdinand Hodler, but his meeting with German painter August Babberger led him to the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts and to Lyrical Expressionism. From that point on, he divided his time between painting, illustration, writing and a long-term collaboration with Nebelspalter, a satirical magazine.

Exhibition view Haus für Kunst Uri, photo: F.X Brun

Heinrich Danioth, <em>Kehlengletscher</em>, 1919, oil on canvas, 62 x 79.5 cm. © Haus für Kunst Uri, Altdorf