Félix Vallotton

Félix Vallotton (born December 28, 1865, Lausanne, Switzerland—died December 28, 1925, Paris, France) was a Swiss-born French graphic artist and painter known for his paintings of nudes and interiors and in particular for his distinctive woodcuts.

Vallotton was raised in a traditional bourgeois and Protestant household. After completing secondary school, he left Lausanne in 1882 for Paris to pursue art studies. Though he was accepted by the École des Beaux-Arts, he chose to attend the less traditional Académie Julian, where he studied with French painters Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger and enjoyed virtually free rein over his pursuits. He took the opportunity to study graphic arts—lithography and other methods of printmaking. He exhibited publicly for the first time in 1885 at the Salon des Artistes Français—the oil painting Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbach, the subject of which was an American mathematician and neighbour of the artist. In 1889 Vallotton exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris as the representative from Switzerland and won honourable mention for the same portrait.

While at the Académie Julian, Vallotton had become friends with and protégè of artist and printmaker Charles Maurin, who introduced him to the art of woodcut. Maurin also introduced Vallotton to the haunts of Montmartre—the cafés and cabarets such as Le Chat Noir, where he met artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Vallotton moved to live near Montparnasse, the city’s slumlike breeding ground for artists, poets, musicians, and writers, as he drew closer to Toulouse-Lautrec and the bohemian culture of Paris. To make ends meet, he began selling prints of drawings he had made after Rembrandt and Jean-François Millet. In 1890 he also began contributing art reviews to the Gazette de Lausanne, an appointment he maintained through 1897.

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Vallotton worked in woodcut almost exclusively throughout the 1890s. In 1892 he began associating with a group of artists called the Nabis (from Hebrew navi, meaning “prophet,” or “seer”)—Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, and Maurice Denis. Vallotton exhibited with them for the first time that year at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Though only loosely affiliated with the group, Vallotton, like them, looked to Symbolist artists and to the Japanese tradition of woodcut. Both stressed the flatness of the surface and the use of simplified abstract forms, strong lines (evident in Vallotton’s prints), and bold colours (evident in his paintings of the period, his Paris street scenes from the mid-1890s, for example). Of the paintings he completed in that period, Bathers on a Summer Evening (1892–93) attracted the most attention. That large-scale composition of women of various ages and in various stages of undress was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in spring 1893, and it shocked the crowds with its eroticism.

During the 1890s Vallotton also became more politically engaged and communicated his sentiments through his prints, which were printed in Paris’s literary and political publications such as Le Rire, Le Revue blanche, L’Assiette au beurre, and Le Courrier français, as well as in Pan (Berlin), Die Jugend (Munich), and the U.S. publications Scribner’s and The Chap-Book. He was particularly vocal about his support for Alfred Dreyfus at the time of the Dreyfus affair (1894). Valletton’s woodcut The Age of Paper (1898), published on the January cover of Le Cri de Paris, shows figures reading newspapers, all of which are Parisian publications known to be pro-Dreyfus. Other notable political woodcut prints include The Charge and The Demonstration (both 1893).

Vallotton used woodcuts for nonpolitical purposes as well. He worked in the medium to depict simple yet striking intimate interior scenes of nudes, bathers, romantic and sometimes private moments between couples, and musicians playing their instruments. His woodcuts attracted international attention and acclaim. Like the Nabi painters, Vallotton created many interiors (paintings and woodcuts), including his best-known series, titled Intimacies (published in La Revue blanche in 1898), 10 woodcuts depicting private marital moments that allude to adultery and deceit. He also designed a theatre playbook cover for Swedish dramatist August Strindberg’s The Father (1894) and served as illustrator for several books throughout the 1890s, such as Jules Renard’s The Mistress and Remy de Gourmont’s The Book of Masks (both 1896).

In 1898 Vallotton was the subject of a monograph by German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe. In 1899 he married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, a wealthy Jewish widow, daughter of art dealer Alexandre Bernheim. Vallotton’s marriage not only landed him back in the bourgeois world in which he had been raised, but it also escalated his career, as he was given many opportunities to exhibit at his father-in-law’s Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. Vallotton became a naturalized French citizen in 1900.

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Though he had been painting throughout his career, at the beginning of the 20th century he shifted his focus away from printmaking to oil painting, creating many nudes, as well as landscapes, still-life paintings, interiors, and portraits—all rendered in a simplified realist manner that has been likened to that of Gustave Courbet and J.-A.-D. Ingres. Vallotton painted portraits of members of the Paris cultural elite, including Félix Fénéon (1896), Thadée Natanson (1897), Ambroise Vollard (1901–02), Gaston and Josse Bernheim-Jeune (1901), Paul Verlaine (1902), and Gertrude Stein (1907), and the very large The Five Painters (1902–03)—a group portrait of Nabi artists Bonnard, Vuillard, Charles Cottet, Roussel, and Vallotton engaged in conversation around a desk. He painted his wife numerous times, usually involved in domestic activity. By 1907 Vallotton was also trying his hand at writing, penning a novel that year (La Vie meurtrière, published posthumously in 1930; “The Murderous Life”) and several unpublished plays over the course of several years.

Throughout the 1910s Vallotton exhibited his work regularly and, after nearly 15 years, returned to woodcut to produce the antiwar series C’est la guerre! (1915; “This is War!”). Increasingly consumed with the ravages of World War I, Vallotton applied and was accepted in late 1916 to be part of a group of artists to visit the front lines and witness the drama of war in person. Several works emerged from that experience, including Ruins at Souain and Verdun (both 1917), an abstract, Futurist-inspired depiction of battle. He also published in Les Écrits nouveaux the essay “Art et Guerre,” (1917; “Art and War”), in which he described the challenges of conveying the realities of war through art.

The last 10 years of Vallotton’s career were less successful. In ill health, Vallotton saw waning appreciation for his art. He continued to make art, however, until he died of cancer at age 60. Though he is most often associated with the Nabis, he never strictly aligned himself with the movement. He has proven difficult to categorize within the framework of art history, showing a range of influences—the Old Masters, Symbolism, Realism, Post-Impressionism, and Japonism (a movement that assimilated Japanese aesthetics). Art critics and historians credit Vallotton with reviving the art of woodcut, which was then adopted after 1905 by Expressionist artists such as Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and subsequently became a mainstay of modern art.