Summary of Félix Vallotton
Vallotton never quite reached the heights of fame of some of his avant-garde contemporaries, but he developed his own unique style and history now views him as one of the most original artists of his era. His status stands on a body of work that encompasses portraits, satirical prints, interior narratives, landscapes and still lifes. His early printmaking caught the eye of Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard who invited him to join the Nabis group. Though he never really settled as a member of Nabis, his affiliation with the group brought him into contact with a circle of literary bohemians. Through these new associations he was able to plot a more singular path that saw him make his name via a collection of groundbreaking satirical woodcuts for avant-garde left-wing journals. As his career evolved, Vallotton turned his dispassionate eye more and more towards painting. Transferring the block technique of his printmaking to his painting, his distinctive vision offered a fine balance between Realist and Symbolist techniques that saw many of his mature works convey a palpable sense of psychological disquiet.
Accomplishments
- In creating some of the most visually distinctive, and bitingly satirical, images of turn-of-the-century Parisian life, Vallotton earned the title of greatest printmaker of his generation. Credited in fact with reviving the art of woodcut printing, he drew on the traditions of Ukiyo-e Japanese woodblock prints, by eighteenth century artists such as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige, to create biting political narratives whose effect was heightened through his bold contrast of jet black ink on white paper.
- Though he was at the center of the most experimental period of Western art, Vallotton remained mostly dedicated to realist representations. Resisting the abstract preferences of the avant-garde, he produced a more idiosyncratic style of painting that the public and critics of the day failed to fully comprehend and, as such, he can be credited with widening the parameters of what it meant to be a "modernist". Indeed, his daring and originality led to a habit for creating controversy that the avant-gardist would have been proud of.
- Vallotton was famous for an album of 10 prints entitled intimacies, a collection of domestic vignettes chronicling intimate liaisons between bourgeois couples. In Vallotton's unravelling of the forbidden mores of private bourgeois life, he had, according to historians such as Merel van Tilburg, brought art into line with late-nineteenth century literature in the way commentaries on the hidden drives of the human psyche were anticipating the imminent birth of psychoanalysis.
- Based on sketches and photographs, but formed in his imagination, Vallotton's paysages composés ("patched together" landscapes) were unique and possessed an otherworldly quality that might have pre-empted the Surrealists. Through their bold outlines, flattened colors and silhouettes, images such as The Sheaves (1915) and The church of Souain in silhouette (1917) remain some of the most moving symbolic meditations on the affects of the Great War.
Biography of Félix Vallotton
"The master of eerie estrangement", the Royal Academy labelled him. It was a title Vallotton might have appreciated given his preference for painting "people who are level-headed but who have an unspoken vice deep inside them" ... a state of being, he readily admitted, "that I share".
