"If an object is pleasant, repetition will increase its charm; if it expresses sorrow or pain, then repetition will intensify its melancholy. On the contrary, any subject that is peculiar or unpleasant will be made unbearable by repetition. So repetition always acts to increase intensity. Since the time that this principle of harmony was employed by the primitives, it has been visually lost, and so forgotten. One strove for the charm of variety, and so achieved the destruction of unity.. .Variety is just as much an element of beauty as parallelism, provided that one does not exaggerate it. For the structure of our eye itself demands that we introduce some variety into any absolutely unified object.. .To be simple is not always as easy as it seems.. .The work of art will bring to light a new order inherent in things, and this will be: the idea of unity."
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another source of his 'parallelism' concept is Hodler's letter, written in 1904 to ; in which Hodler explained his design principle of 'parallelism', later adopted by the Vienna Secession artists. The Leopold Museum in Vienna discovered and owns this letter
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Hodler
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Ferdinand Hodler
Ferdinand Hodler (March 14, 1853 - May 19, 1918) was one of the best-known Swiss painters of the nineteenth century. His early works were portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings in a realistic style. Later, he adopted a personal form of Symbolism he called 'parallelism'.
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