10 The New York Review
Vallotton’s Demons
Sanford Schwartz
Félix Vallotton:
Painter of Disquiet
an exhibition at the Royal Academy of
Arts, London, June 30–September 29,
2019; and the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York City, October 29,
2019–January 26, 2020.
Catalog of the exhibition
by Dita Amory, Ann Dumas,
Patrick McGuinness, Belinda Thomson,
Philippe Büttner, Katia Poletti,
and Christian Rümelin.
London: Royal Academy of Arts,
182 pp., $45.
(distributed in the US
by Artbook/D.A.P.)
Félix Vallotton was talked about
as a highly individual, even
anomalous, figure already in the
1890s, when he was in his late
twenties and early thirties—
and when his work was actually
most aligned with that of his
contemporaries—and the sense
that he is an unclassifiable art-
ist has remained to this day. He
is probably best known for being
part of a group of artists that
included Édouard Vuillard and
Pierre Bonnard and who called
themselves (not with great seri-
ousness) Nabis, which is Hebrew
for prophets. If they were proph-
esying anything in their scenes
of Parisian street life and of the
living rooms and dining rooms of
their families and friends, it was a
new degree of accuracy about the
way we see light and atmosphere.
Vuillard and Bonnard created
worlds in which the figure, color
in its own right, and the textures of the
foreground and the background of a
scene became almost indistinguishable
from one another. Without intending it,
they were leading the way to a purely
abstract art.
Vallotton (1865–1925), who is the
subject of a small retrospective at the
Metropolitan Museum, his first ever in
New York, had no desire to break down
forms in the manner of his fellow art-
ists. He had intrepidly set out from his
native Switzerland for Paris to become
a painter when he was all of sixteen;
but at the same time he was conserva-
tive as a person and as an artist. His
god was Ingres. He believed that every
form needed to be immaculately delin-
eated. Yet in the 1890s, in his woodcut
prints and his paintings, he showed
street life and interior scenes in ways
that complemented the pictures of his
fellow Nabis.
His pictures could have a wry, satiri-
cal, and even melodramatic note that
was foreign to the work of his French
colleagues and yet added a kind of
seasoning to it. He might almost have
been saying, “There is an underside to
the cozy realms created by my friends.”
His taste for the tempo of contempo-
rary life, however, began to dissipate
after 1900 or so (which may have been
true also for Vuillard and Bonnard).
Vallotton largely went back to being a
more traditional painter of formal por-
traits, landscapes, still lifes, and the
female nude—though one whose pic-
tures of any kind are marked by paint
surfaces of a certain refinement and
sensitivity.
Unfortunately, the Met’s show does
not make us feel that Vallotton has
been unjustly pushed to the side of art
history. Although there are a number
of engaging works on view—Dinner
by Lamplight (1899) is a haunting and
disturbing painting of a family gather-
ing that practically justifies the show on
its own—he comes across as an elusive
and even confounding figure. The thin-
ness of the exhibition, however, isn’t
entirely attributable to him. His work
from the 1890s—both his woodcut
prints, which have always been his best-
known pictures, and his paintings—
properly make up the core of the show;but for an exhibition composed of some
forty paintings there are too many
bland, second-level examples among
them. The catalog presents, moreover,
ten paintings that were part of the ex-
hibition when it was first shown last
year at the Royal Academy of Arts in
London, and many of those pictures—
they include images of people dancing,
of a writer working at a desk, and of a
person looking for something in a linen
closet—would have added substance to
the group at the Met.
It is u n for t u nate a s wel l that there a re
none of Vallotton’s lovely small paint-
ings of aspects of Paris life, particularly
along the Seine, at different times of
day. A number of them were part of
the artist’s far larger and more compre-
hensive retrospective held at the Yale
University Art Gallery in 1991, and
they show how Vallotton, for all his de-
votion to Ingres, was often influenced,
in the occasional squatness and round-
edness of his figures and the fairy-tale
aura of his scenes, by Henri Rousseau.
As it stands, the few works in the cur-
rent exhibition from those years after
Vallotton left the orbit of Vuillard and
Bonnard don’t give much to dwell on.
Viewers might, though, discern from
the handful of landscapes on display
that Vallotton never fully set aside his
feeling for color and design.
At their best, there is an appealing
toylike quality—a sense that people
can be seen as mechanical, wound-
up forces—to Vallotton’s prints and
paintings. In the woodcuts he made
in Paris in the 1890s, which gave him
an international renown at the time,part of what charms us is the blocky
and almost Lego-like appearance of
his characters and settings. In these
small black-and-white prints, people
scurry through the streets, dodge cops,
and run for cover from anarchist bomb
threats or rain. They crowd department
stores during a sale, dance on stage in
burlesque routines, and, in a small mas-
terpiece entitled Fireworks, are out at
night watching the show, their faces
looking upward like so many light-
catching bubbles in a dark pool.
If at first there seems something
crude and unfinished about Vallotton’s
woodcuts, it partly may be due to theway that the eyes of his figures are rarely
made up of more than a dot, an empty
little circle, or a short line. But these de-
tails turn out to be an aspect of why the
Swiss artist’s prints have dated relatively
little. With their abrupt small faces, the
people in his woodcuts are practically of
a piece with the figures in the work of
some graphic novelists today.
In Vallotton’s paintings of the 1890s
we also look at somewhat doll-like fig-
ures, though now in scenes made up of
eye-catchingly decorative or theatri-
cally shadowy tones. A number of the
artist’s paintings of the time seem to
be showing liaisons, but what is alive
may be less the possibly illicit doings
than the comically intrusive and totally
generic club chairs, sofas, doors, and
bookcases, and, too, the way they ap-
pear in candy-box colors, painted so
that they give off an enamel-like gleam.
Color and an unexpected composition
mark, for example, a strong small pic-
ture in the Met’s show from 1899 called
The Ball, which presents, from above,
a little girl running for an orange ball.
We know we are looking at a person,
but what we see of her at first is hardly
more than a yellow circle (her straw
hat) and a white shape (her frock).Vallotton is not, it should be said,
primarily known for his humor, lively
color, or high spirits. Saying what he
stands for, though, has never been easy.
The current exhibition was entitled
“Félix Vallotton” when it was at the
Royal Academy. The Met has added
a subtitle—“Painter of Disquiet”—about which one can have mixed feel-
ings. Stamping an artist with a word,
especially an artist as little known as
Vallotton, makes viewers almost invol-
untarily believe that the named spirit is
what they will find as they look. Yet the
subtitle makes sense. Although aspects
of the artist’s work, from the 1890s es-
pecially, are witty and even lovable,
there are facets of it and of Vallotton’s
art in general that confuse us about
his meanings and can be off-puttingly
mordant, even strange.
His painting The Lie (1897), for
example, which is in the exhibition,
shows a man and a woman in a kind of
soap-opera embrace. We see his
slightly smiling face and closed
eyes, while most of her face is
blocked. In the collection of the
Baltimore Museum of Art, the
picture is a stylishly compressed
venture in predominantly red,
yellow, and black, and it is surely
the most entertainingly satirical
and formally adventurous paint-
ing by the artist in an Ameri-
can museum. The title, however,
holds us up. It is like a little drop
of poison in the scene. Who is
lying? Are they both faking?
Some of the artist’s woodcuts
of Parisians in interiors have a
queasy- making edge as well. This
isn’t true of such well-known and
elegant examples as the one in
which a nude woman lazes about
with a cat, or the series of people
playing musical instruments. But
a degree of uncertainty is there in
a group of images called Intima-
cies (1897–1898), in which his fig-
ures embrace, make love in bed, or find
themselves at different ends of a sofa,
caught in an emotional impasse. What
gives the scenes their life is Vallotton’s
ingenuity in creating believable, three-
dimensional beings and objects out
of only flat, pure white and flat, pure
black. In The Triumph, for instance, al-
most the whole lower half of the image
is black, yet the bits of white planted
here and there make us realize that a
woman is on a couch and a man is at a
desk, his elbows resting on books.
What, though, is the “triumph”? It
would appear that the woman, who
is quite calm and self-possessed, has
scored one on the man, who is deflated.
And while on a first or second viewing
one might not see Intimacies as being
about the battle of the sexes, with men
on the losing end, the theme is unde-
niably there, and it makes the pictures
slightly illustrational.
But then to follow Vallotton’s notions
about women is to be taken to a disori-
enting and alienating place. He was
long drawn to the subject of the female
nude, and after the turn of the century
it became probably his foremost theme.
The exhibition gives us only a slight
sense of this. At the artist’s big show
at Yale, though, there were a few more
of these paintings—his largest works
by far, some are six or seven feet on a
side—and they cast a pall over his lively
and intimately sized work of the 1890s.
The pictures aren’t erotic. In their
neutral lighting and the way Vallotton
often gives flesh the tone of a luster-
less, grayish marble, they are simply
glum. We are not at all sure what heFélix Vallotton: Dinner by Lamplight, 22 1/ 2 x 35 1/4 inches, 1899Muséed’Orsay,^ Paris