If it hadn’t been Vallotton, someone else would have done it, with half of Paris high on ukiyo-e woodcuts ever since Japan had been forcibly opened for commerce in the 1850s.

The artist’s great achievement was to revive woodcut printing in Europe. Yet his signature contributions to modern art eschewed the riotous chromatic wallpaper of Bonnard and Vuillard-and even color in general. Bonnard and Vuillard took this approach indoors, turning bourgeois interiors into hallucinatory scenes.Īs demonstrated by the paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective of Vallotton’s work, “Painter of Disquiet,” the artist was a fine colorist, on par with his better-known peers. They preached spiritual renewal and, more productively, a jettisoning of the canvas’s illusionistic space in favor of stylization, lurid color, and an overt use of ornament. He soon fell in with the Nabis (Hebrew for “prophets”), a group united in their esteem for Gauguin and Cézanne that included Bonnard and Vuillard. What, aside from double-entry bookkeeping, lurked in the heart of the bourgeoisie, and how to represent its likeness?Įnter Félix Vallotton, striver son in a Swiss bourgeois family who came to Paris in 1882 and enrolled at the Académie Julian, a freewheeling alternative to the École des Beaux-Arts. In little more than a century, this newish class had gone from being comedic fast-talking Figaros to planet-altering overlords striding across the globe in search of a soul, status, and an appropriate self-image. Vallotton finished his portrait in a matter of weeks and gave it to Gertrude Stein.The bourgeoisie: now there’s a subject for a nineteenth-century artist. Vallotton's trenchant woodcuts of the 1890s solidified his reputation as a printmaker of the first rank while boldly messaging his left-wing politics.įor the first time ever, this exhibition displays Picasso's legendary portrait of Gertrude Stein, from The Met collection, alongside Vallotton's rendering of this formidable collector, which was painted a year later. His lampooning wit, subversive satire, and wry humor is apparent everywhere in his artistic production.

Today we recognize him as a distinctive artist of his generation. Witness to the radical aesthetics that gripped Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Vallotton developed his own singular voice. Swiss-born and Paris-educated, Vallotton (1865–1925) created lasting imagery of fin-de-siècle Paris. Painted portraits, luminous landscapes, and interior narratives that pulse with psychological tension join the exhibition from more than two dozen lenders. Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet presents pivotal moments in the artist's career as a painter and printmaker.

Artist felix vallotton