February 13, 2020 11
was thinking. Did he believe he was
celebrating women’s bodies? And how
does th is possibi l ity squa re w ith h is pic -
tures (which can be found reproduced
in the Met and Yale catalogs and else-
where) that touch on allegory and my-
thology—works that show, say, a satyr
gripping a nude woman in his arms as
he races across a landscape? What are
we to make of a large painting called
Hatred (1908), which presents a nude
man and a nude woman, their arms
up before their chests, tensely coming
before each other on a bare stage? At
least as it is seen in a reproduction in
the Met’s catalog, this picture is repel-
lent on every level.
Penetrating Vallotton’s thinking is
not easy, especially when we consider
what the sense of violence and strife
found in paintings such as Hatred and
in his woodcuts, too—for example, in
the frightening Murder, showing a man
lunging with a knife to stab someone
in bed, or The Alarm, which presents a
vile image of swans attacking a bathing
woman. A prolific painter, Vallotton
managed as well to write three novels,
eight plays, and a large amount of art
criticism. He also kept a journal. Little
of this appears to have been translated
into English (and almost nothing be-
sides the criticism was published in his
lifetime). But Sasha Newman, in the
catalog of the Yale show, writes that
Vallotton’s fiction takes us to the same
conflicted and unhappy place as do
Hatred and Murder. She describes one
of his novels, La Vie meurtrière (The
Murderous Life), as being about a man
who is convinced he is responsible for
three deaths, although they were all
accidents.
The sense of Vallotton as a person
preyed on by internal demons might
almost be the larger point of Vuillard’s
portrait of his friend (and sometime
confidant). Félix Vallotton in His Studio
is one of Vuillard’s rare portraits that
has a psychological sense of a sitter (and
is one of his more memorable works).
Seen here in a kind of blue workman’s
outfit and wearing red shoes, and
perched on a small table in the corner of
a room, Vallotton appears almost a for-
lorn, perhaps sulking, boy. It is hard to
say what his scrunched face expresses,
but he seems frustrated and vexed.
By the time Vuillard’s painting was
done, in 1900, the world of the Nabis—
and of the influential and stylish pub-
lication called La Revue blanche that
most of them contributed to—had
begun to crumble. Soon the marriage of
its magnetic chief proprietors and edi-
tors, Thadée and Misia Natanson, both
of whom were painted by Vallotton
and who had made him an important
member of their wider family of writ-
ers, musicians, and artists, would col-
lapse. Vallotton himself had helped in
this dissolution by leaving the working-
class woman he had been with for many
years and marrying, in 1899, a wealthy
widow with three children named Ga-
brielle Rodrigues-Henriques.
Gabrielle was the daughter of Alex-
andre Bernheim and the sister of Josse
and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune, who to-
gether ran, in their name, one of the
most prestigious art galleries in Paris.Gabrielle and Félix’s marriage, in ad-
dition to altering entirely the way the
artist lived, gave him the very welcome
backing of his new family’s gallery. His
move seems to have taken most of his
friends by surprise, and commentators
over the years have wondered about
his motives. Far more than Vuillard
or Bonnard, he had always been clear
about his need to succeed financially as
an artist.
Vallotton would go on to do portraits
of Gabrielle and interior scenes in
which she appears, but these pictures,
some of which are in the show, lack any
real tension. In Dinner by Lamplight,
however, done not long after his mar-
riage, he created a powerful work that
not only feels as if it were an accurate
account of his new circumstances but
seems to contain much of the painful,
comic, angry, and lonely emotional
life that one feels he inwardly led. The
painting presents a dark, nighttime
space that is illuminated solely by a
strong white light streaming down from
the lamp overhead. Underneath it, four
people sit at a little circular table, laid
with a red-and-white tablecloth. Mov-
ing counterclockwise, we see a woman
who might be a wife or mother (or Ga-
brielle), a little girl whose staring eyes
make her slightly demonic, and a thin,
youngish man who has his hand up to
his mouth and appears to be jamming
a roll into it.
The fourth person is directly before
us, seen only from his back and flat as a
silhouette. He seems to have emanated
from the dense black that entirely
surrounds the bright table, and eventhough we see nothing of his face, he
is our protagonist. We sense his aware-
ness of the scene, though to the work’s
benefit we can’t pinpoint what that is.
His flat, insidious presence is like a
barrier keeping us from entering the
painting, but his blankness is also an
invitation for the viewer to step in and
be a part of it.
The subject of a small, mostly fam-
ily gathering at lunch or dinner was not
in itself new to the Nabi artists. Vuil-
lard had been making first-rate pictures
with this setting on and off through the
1890s, and Bonnard in at least one pic-
ture had emphasized the importance
of the lamp at the dining table. With a
belief in Ibsen and contemporary the-
ater ingrained in the spirit of La Revue
Blanche—the Natansons at one point
made a pilgrimage to Oslo to meet the
great playwright—Vuillard had occa-
sionally made paintings that suggested
moments in a play when characters find
themselves cut off from one another. He
had even, in A Family Evening (1895),
placed a darkened and brooding figure
at the bottom center of his image.
But Vallotton in Dinner by Lamp-
light is more purely visual than literary
in his approach. He doesn’t give us, as
Vuillard did, a figure who appears to
be lost in his thoughts. Vallotton’s pic-
ture is stark and ominous—it is like a
glimpse of film noir forty years before
its time—and yet it imparts a more
complex sense of an intimate gathering
than does a work by Vuillard or Bon-
nard. We feel, for instance, that Val-
lotton’s silhouette figure is intruding
on the other members of the scene. Yet
our blank silhouette also suggests the
situation—almost the plight—of some-
one who, while seeing himself as an ob-
server of others, is also a person who
for whatever reason cannot be fully
himself when others are there. The pic-
ture is in part about how we at times
feel ourselves invisible and impalpable.
All of this can be perceived without a
viewer needing to know any thing about
Vallotton’s biography. But being aware
of the artist’s background enables us to
savor more fully his rashness here. Es-
sentially, he has wed the color and heft
of a painting to the nervier spirit of his
woodcuts, in which he used sweeping
areas of black and populated his scenes
with fidgety, antic characters, like the
wonderful Dickensian scarecrow here
who is holding the bread to his face.
One leaves Dinner by Lamplight
wishing that Vallotton had continued
to blend his painting with aspects of
his thinking as a graphic artist. He did
so in a mild and indirect way, at least,
in the landscapes and still lifes (as op-
posed to his nudes) that he went on to
make in his later years. As examples
at the Met indicate, his feeling for a
taut design was particularly evident
when he showed the sun or the moon
over water. Watery reflections allowed
him to create images in which the
sun or the moon could appear in dif-
ferent places in the same scene, and
other elements—whether light spots on
waves, trees on the shore, or patterns
in the water current—could have their
own separate presences and colors,
each balanced against the next. What
are not in any of his later pictures, of
course, are the topics that the younger
Vallotton sometimes handled coarsely,
it is true, but at other times brought
off with a sure touch: the commotions,
jokes, deceptions, acts of anger, and
small mysteries of everyday life. QFélix Vallotton: The Charge, 9 1/ 2 x 12 11/16 inches, 1893Cabinetd’arts^graphiques,^ Musées^ d’art^etd’histoire,^ GenevaToronto Pursuits at the
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