View into Infinity came into being as the result of the contract for a mural in the stairwell of the Kunsthaus Zürich, which took years to complete. The more intimate Winterthur version was completed in the spring of 1916, which followed a larger version that is now on display in Kunstmuseum Basel. In the end Zürich accepted the final version.

The picture shows five female figures dressed in blue standing in a line. Their arms form an ornamental line. Their hands appear to be reaching for each other but aren’t actually touching. The figures are standing in front of a background that is closed at the top, which implies the earth. A few plants have been ornamentally set into the surface. The earth appears to have been drawn sparsely yet clearly in front of the infinite cosmos.

View into Infinity is determined by the play of symmetry; Hodler re-examined ideas in this composition that he had consolidated under the title of parallelism during the 1890s. In parallelism he describes the recurrence of phenomena that ultimately create the impression of unity. In this he believed he had recognised the foundation of all natural phenomena. Unity was thus Hodler’s primary concern – unity as harmony, unity as a formal principle, and as the philosophical concept of the nature of things. This insight is based on the idea, «that which unites us, is more powerful than that, which divides us».