Felix Vallotton
Born Lausanne, 28 Dec 1865; Died Paris, 28 Dec 1925.
Swiss printmaker, painter and critic, active in France. He attended school in Lausanne, then moved to Paris in 1882 and enrolled as an art student at the Académie Julian. Paris remained his main base for the rest of his life, although he returned regularly to Switzerland to see his family. He became a close friend of Charles Cottet and Charles Maurin, who was his teacher and mentor. As a student, copying in the Louvre, Vallotton was drawn to the minute realism of the earlier masters, in particular Holbein, whose work he sought to emulate. He succeeded in having portraits accepted by the Salon jury in 1885 and 1886.
Vallotton was primarily a printmaker. He first made a drypoint etching in 1881. Between 1888 and 1892, to make ends meet, he produced reproductive etchings after such artists as Rembrandt and Millet, and from 1891 to 1895 he worked as Paris art correspondent for the Gazette de Lausanne: he showed sympathy for independent artists such as Puvis de Chavannes, Whistler and Toulouse-Lautrec and praised the innovations of his contemporaries in the avant-garde. In 1892 he produced his first woodcut, and it was in this medium, largely neglected until its revival in the 1890s, that Vallotton was to excel. His work appeared regularly in the Revue Blanche. In 1892 he joined the Nabis group. That year he exhibited woodcuts at the first Salon de la Rose+Croix, in the company of Maurin, and participated in the second Nabis group exhibition at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. From this date he exhibited regularly with the Nabis in Paris and elsewhere. In the favourable climate of Art Nouveau, Vallotton’s woodcuts awakened international interest; examples appeared in The Studio (1893), the American Chap Book (1894) and the German periodicals Pan and Jugend (1895–6) and he had a substantial influence on the German woodcut revival at the beginning of the 20th century.
Vallotton’s woodcut style is extremely simple; it makes play with contrasts between pure blocks of black and white and stark contours, exaggerated almost to the point of caricature. Unlike the other key exponents of the woodcut in the 1890s, Gauguin and Munch, Vallotton did not exploit the irregularities of the wood grain for artistic effect but relied on icy precision, a quality he also cultivated in his painting.
Vallotton found the subjects of his woodcuts in the tense and humorous spectacles of modern city life, both public and private. In The Demonstration , for instance, which was included in L’Estampe originale (1893–5), an album dedicated to promoting the original print, Vallotton bore witness, as an anarchist sympathizer, to the street violence that frequently resulted from social unrest in the early 1890s in Paris. In the celebrated series Intimacies (1898), ten woodcuts depicting the traumatic disintegration of a love affair, Vallotton found inspiration in a contemporary novel by his friend Jules Renard; his stark use of the woodcut medium added a mood of Symbolist intensity to these private interior scenes.
Following his marriage in 1899 to Gabrielle Rodrique-Henriques, a member of the Bernheim-Jeune family, Vallotton’s financial security was assured. He continued to produce illustrations for journals such as L’Assiette au beurre (1901) and demonstrated his social views in the album C’est la guerre, a series of anti-German propagandist woodcuts published in 1917. After 1902 Vallotton concentrated mainly on painting highly finished studies of interiors and nudes, such as Models Resting (1905; Winterthur, Kstmus.). He continued to exhibit regularly, though with less success after 1914. His brother Paul, an art dealer in Lausanne, assisted in promoting Vallotton’s work in Switzerland.
Belinda Thomson. "Vallotton, Félix." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T087707 (accessed March 8, 2012).
