Félix Vallotton

The Money: Intimacies (Intimités)

Vallotton is attributed with reinventing woodcuts by introducing them to a new audience through contemporary, psychologically charged, subject matter. With his Intimacies series of 10 prints, he had moved away from his overt political statements to observe private interior settings featuring the "intimacies" of Parisian bourgeois couples. The works, which remain, arguably, his best known, feature smooth black blocks of wood, cut through with sharp white lines. In The Money, two-thirds of the woodcut remains in black while the cut itself occupies only one-third of the left side of the image. Vallotton shows us a gentleman trying to engage in conversation with his companion. She, however, seems disengaged and her gaze is fixed on something beyond the balcony widow and outside the picture frame. Vallotton creates a sense of ambiguity and dramatic mystery through the image; its title allowing the viewer's imagination to run free with possible (negative) interpretations.

Vallotton was creating these works at a tumultuous time for a city rushing headlong into modernity. The assault on tradition gave rise to feelings of disillusionment and unease, especially amongst the conservative bourgeois class. And at a time when so much focus was on the changing face of the city, it was farsighted of Vallotton to turn his attention to interior worlds. As arts journalist Kitty Jackson observed, "For Vallotton [...] the interior scene seems to subvert our expectation of control, of being 'at home' in your own residence. Instead of posing, looking out from the canvas and sitting steadily for a portrait work, the upper-class people in Vallotton's images are caught off-guard, unposed and unprepared. They are captured mid-conversation, mid-elicit tryst or mid-deception. Their interior world is one of lies, of tension and of disconnection. Vallotton seems to use the interior space as a scene in which to get under the skin of the lavish display of wealth and gentility in Parisian society. He suggests that behind the carefully orchestrated displays of bourgeoisie life there is dislocated, troubling and fractured reality".

Le Bain au soir d'été (Bathers on a summer evening)

Painted in the same year as La Malade, Bathers on a summer evening illustrates Vallotton's shift from realism to something altogether more symbolic and decorative. In a strangely flattened composition, contemporary women (recognizable as such through their hairstyles and facial expressions) in various stages of undress bathe in, or disrobe beside, a pool. Vallotton flaunts the rules of perspective here: the ploughed lines of the distant fields follow convention by moving towards a vanishing point, while figures of differing sizes appear as if they have been arranged and collaged onto the background; disconnected, seemingly, from their surroundings and from each other. The treatment of some of the women is reminiscent of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, and, in the erotic and decorative line drawings, the paintings of Klimt and Schiele. The style in which each of the women is rendered differs too. Some are naturalistically shaped and shaded; others almost encased in white rectangular robes, like pillars rising out of the water. Art historians Dita Amory and Ann Dumas said of this piece that "Its cold eroticism laid the foundations for Vallotton's entire later exploration of the Female nude".

Of all the works Vallotton created during his association with Les Nabis, Bathers on a summer evening was probably the most controversial, even causing a minor scandal when it was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1893. Seen in the context of his earlier satirical works, the painting can be read as an ironic take on fin-de-siècle society and as a caricature of bourgeois leisure pursuits. Vallotton's variation on the theme of "the fountain of life" also provoked bemusement among the critics and public who failed to respond to its originality or to recognize the subtle references to the likes of Rousseau and Japanese ukiyo-e prints. On viewing the work, Toulouse-Lautrec was one of the few to appreciate it, but even he predicted that the police were likely to "come and take it away".

Oil on canvas - Kunsthaus, Zürich

La Visite (The Visit)

In this sumptuous domestic scene, Vallotton lets the viewer in on a private moment, possibly a clandestine tryst between a man and a woman in a Paris drawing room. The strong verticals and horizontals of the room give the image the feeling of a theatrical set. The plush upholstered velvet furniture is echoed in the contours of the woman's coat, while a sinuous shadow extends from the black of the man's suit up the wall. A door is open to another room, probably an adjoining bed chamber, suggesting the couple's illicit intentions.

This is one of numerous images Vallotton painted of intimate moments between men and women, sometimes in restaurants, sometimes at the theater, and often suggesting seduction or coercion, but rarely romance or love. One critic, Octave Mirbeau, has described how, "the figures don't just smile and cry, they speak [...] they express strongly, with the most moving eloquence, when it is Monsieur Vallotton who hears them speak, their humanity and the character of their humanity". Vallotton himself spoke of something mysterious laying beneath the surface of his painting: "I think I paint for people who are level-headed but who have an unspoken vice deep inside them," he remarked. "I actually like this state which I share".

Distemper on cardboard - Kunsthaus, Zürich

L'église de Souain en silhouette (The church of Souain in silhouette)

Vallotton was 48 when war broke out and he felt redundant on learning that he was too old to serve his adopted country (he become a French citizen in 1900). He was profoundly affected by the violence in reports coming back from the front lines and following the 1916 French victory at Verdun, Vallotton wrote, "Out of the all the horror rises a perfect nobility; we are becoming truly proud to be on the side of humanity, and whatever happens, the French name is made young again with a lustre unknown until now".

In 1917 Vallotton was able to show his patriotism by accepting a commission from the French Ministry of Fine Arts to tour the Champagne front. There he found once proud towns and villages reduced to rubble and ruins. The artist asked himself, "What to represent of all this?". Souain had been the setting for two battles and was now an area used to test the ability of French tanks to cross razed terrains. Silhouetted against the backdrop of a desolate late afternoon sky, the hollow ruins of the church represent the senselessness and destructiveness of the ongoing war. The painting was produced in the studio based on sketches the artist made on his tour. Vallotton endows this view of the church with a cool detachment. His treatment of the subject is in fact more akin to the background painting for an animated film than the kind of meditation one might expect on the wreckage caused by conflict. The flattened colours, bold outlines, silhouetted trees and cartoon-like rendering of the wall, tiles and stone are stylised in the simple manner reminiscent of his woodcut prints.

Oil on canvas - National Gallery of Art, Washington DC