GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Born in Lausanne, Félix Vallotton moved to Paris in 1882 and studied at the Académie Julian, alongside Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard. In 1899 he married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, a wealthy widow with three children. The following year he became a naturalized French citizen, although he remained close to Switzerland throughout his life, vacationing there annually and sending paintings to exhibitions.
After seeing Japanese prints in 1890, Vallotton made his first woodcuts, marked by extreme contrasts of black and white. These were exhibited at the Rose + Croix Salons and at the Salon des Indépendants and celebrated in the Symbolist journal L'Arte et L'Idée as marking a renaissance of the woodcut. Vallotton was internationally acknowledged for this aspect of his work, with commissions for illustrations from The Chap-Book (Chicago), The Studio (London), Die Jugend (Munich) and the influential La Revue Blanche founded by his close friend Thadée Natanson. Beginning in 1892 Vallotton joined his colleagues as part of the Nabis, an international group of artists profoundly influenced by Paul Gauguin, Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Edward Burne-Jones. They evolved a spiritual or metaphysical aesthetic and a synthetic, ornamental style. This association augmented Vallotton's own tendency to work in a very decorative, reductive style, manipulating flat areas of saturated colors and dramatic contrasts of undifferentiated fields and expanses of patterns.
His later work, dominated by interiors, female nudes, portraits, and still lifes is less metaphysical in orientation and reveals even more clearly his innate realist tendency. These later works--between 1905 and 1925--have a slick airless character and psychological tension. Stylistically these works are still indebted to the synthetism of the Nabis but of course must be understood in terms of the "Neue Sachlichkeit" or "Retour a l'ordre," the various realist tendencies which emerged between the wars, but even, too, in terms of Surrealism. His paintings and prints are characterized by large areas of unmodulated color, which establish rhythms of darks and lights across the surface. His nudes in particular, with their sinuous outlines, reveal Vallotton's own hard-edged realism derived from close studies of the work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
Vallotton was a founding member and annual participant of the Salon d'Automne (1902), as an alternative to both the official Salon and the Salon des Indépendants. His other major exhibitions included the Berliner Secession (1900), the Internationale Kunstausstellung in Munich (1905) and the Armory Show in New York (1913). In 1910 he had his first solo show at the Galerie Druet. Too old to enlist in World War I, he was for a short time a stretcher carrier and then visited the front to gather material for his final series of woodcuts, This is War.
Adapted from
- DMA Acquisition proposal (1996.48.FA), 1996.
- Dorothy Kosinski, "Félix Vallotton, Lausanne 1865-1925 Paris," in The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 2000), 225.
NOTES
Removing TMS tags for 1956.81, 1996.48.FA, 1999.36, 2000.29.FA, 2000.106.FA, 2006.47.2,
Fun Fact- quote from biography- source- (Acquisition proposal for Vallotton's The Laundress, Blue Room (1996.48.FA), 1996.)
Fun Fact- nickname- source- (Musee D'Orsay, Felix Vallotton: Fire Beneath Ice, October 2, 2013- January 20, 2014, http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/events/exhibitions/extramural/exhibitions/article/felix-vallotton-37179.html)
Artist geography:
Artist born (geography)
Lausanne (Switzerland)
Artist active (geography)
Paris
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IMAGE ASSETS
Félix Vallotton, Self-Portrait, 1891. woodcut on black and tan wove paper. Art Institute of Chicago, 1968.30. http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/28673?search_no=16&index=36
WEB RESOURCES
- Julian Barnes, "Better with Their Clothes On," The Guardian, Saturday 3 November 2007~This article reviews the exhibition, Félix Vallotton: An Idyll at the Edge (Kunsthaus, Zurich, until January 18, and Kunsthalle, Hamburg, February 15 to May 18 2008) and gives more information on Vallotton's career.
- Félix Valotton: Fire Beneath Ice~Check out the 2013 exhibition catalogue written by Marina Ducrey, Katia Poletti, Isabelle Cahn, Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, and Nienke Bakker.
ARCHIVAL RESOURCES
FUN FACTS
- In his 1898 biography of Vallotton, the important critic Julius Meier-Graefe wrote: "Er ist uns einer derjenigen, deren Schaffen auf die Weiterentwicklung der heutigen Kunst von gewissen Einfluss ist, und es ist uns daher nur daran gelegen, das zu bestimmen, was er dieser Bewegung hinzufugt." [In our opinion, he is one of those whose work has been of influence to the further development of contemporary art, and it therefore concerns us to determine what he adds to this movement.]
- Amongst his colleagues, Vallotton was nicknamed the Nabi étranger (the "foreign Nabi") because of his Swiss origins. His friends did not retire the moniker when Vallotton became a French citizen in 1900.
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General Description
Born in Lausanne, Félix Vallotton moved to Paris in 1882 and studied at the Académie Julian, alongside Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard. In 1899 he married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, a wealthy widow with three children. The following year he became a naturalized French citizen, although he remained close to Switzerland throughout his life, vacationing there annually and sending paintings to exhibitions.
After seeing Japanese prints in 1890, Vallotton made his first woodcuts, marked by extreme contrasts of black and white. These were exhibited at the Rose + Croix Salons and at the Salon des Indépendants and celebrated in the Symbolist journal L'Arte et L'Idée as marking a renaissance of the woodcut. Vallotton was internationally acknowledged for this aspect of his work, with commissions for illustrations from The Chap-Book (Chicago), The Studio (London), Die Jugend (Munich) and the influential La Revue Blanche founded by his close friend Thadée Natanson. Beginning in 1892 Vallotton joined his colleagues as part of the Nabis, an international group of artists profoundly influenced by Paul Gauguin, Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Edward Burne-Jones. They evolved a spiritual or metaphysical aesthetic and a synthetic, ornamental style. This association augmented Vallotton's own tendency to work in a very decorative, reductive style, manipulating flat areas of saturated colors and dramatic contrasts of undifferentiated fields and expanses of patterns.
His later work, dominated by interiors, female nudes, portraits, and still lifes is less metaphysical in orientation and reveals even more clearly his innate realist tendency. These later works--between 1905 and 1925--have a slick airless character and psychological tension. Stylistically these works are still indebted to the synthetism of the Nabis but of course must be understood in terms of the "Neue Sachlichkeit" or "Retour a l'ordre," the various realist tendencies which emerged between the wars, but even, too, in terms of Surrealism. His paintings and prints are characterized by large areas of unmodulated color, which establish rhythms of darks and lights across the surface. His nudes in particular, with their sinuous outlines, reveal Vallotton's own hard-edged realism derived from close studies of the work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
Vallotton was a founding member and annual participant of the Salon d'Automne (1902), as an alternative to both the official Salon and the Salon des Indépendants. His other major exhibitions included the Berliner Secession (1900), the Internationale Kunstausstellung in Munich (1905) and the Armory Show in New York (1913). In 1910 he had his first solo show at the Galerie Druet. Too old to enlist in World War I, he was for a short time a stretcher carrier and then visited the front to gather material for his final series of woodcuts, This is War.
Adapted from
- DMA Acquisition proposal (1996.48.FA), 1996.
- Dorothy Kosinski, "Félix Vallotton, Lausanne 1865-1925 Paris," in The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 2000), 225.
Fun Facts
- In his 1898 biography of Vallotton, the important critic Julius Meier-Graefe wrote: "Er ist uns einer derjenigen, deren Schaffen auf die Weiterentwicklung der heutigen Kunst von gewissen Einfluss ist, und es ist uns daher nur daran gelegen, das zu bestimmen, was er dieser Bewegung hinzufugt." [In our opinion, he is one of those whose work has been of influence to the further development of contemporary art, and it therefore concerns us to determine what he adds to this movement.]
- Amongst his colleagues, Vallotton was nicknamed the Nabi étranger (the "foreign Nabi") because of his Swiss origins. His friends did not retire the moniker when Vallotton became a French citizen in 1900.
Archival Resources
Web Resources
- Julian Barnes, "Better with Their Clothes On," The Guardian, Saturday 3 November 2007~This article reviews the exhibition, Félix Vallotton: An Idyll at the Edge (Kunsthaus, Zurich, until January 18, and Kunsthalle, Hamburg, February 15 to May 18 2008) and gives more information on Vallotton's career.
- Félix Valotton: Fire Beneath Ice~Check out the 2013 exhibition catalogue written by Marina Ducrey, Katia Poletti, Isabelle Cahn, Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, and Nienke Bakker.
Notes
Removing TMS tags for 1956.81, 1996.48.FA, 1999.36, 2000.29.FA, 2000.106.FA, 2006.47.2,
Fun Fact- quote from biography- source- (Acquisition proposal for Vallotton's The Laundress, Blue Room (1996.48.FA), 1996.)
Fun Fact- nickname- source- (Musee D'Orsay, Felix Vallotton: Fire Beneath Ice, October 2, 2013- January 20, 2014, http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/events/exhibitions/extramural/exhibitions/article/felix-vallotton-37179.html)
Artist geography:
Artist born (geography)
Lausanne (Switzerland)
Artist active (geography)
Paris
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