Félix Vallotton

Félix Vallotton FIRE BENEATH THE ICE

FĂŠlix Vallotton Fire Beneath the Ice

Marina Ducrey, Katia Poletti, Isabelle Cahn, Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho and Nienke Bakker

Van Gogh Museum Lecturis

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Self-Portrait, 1897 Oil on cardboard, 59.2 x 48 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Foreword

Félix Vallotton was one of the foremost artists of his generation. Between his birth in Lausanne in 1865 and his death in Paris in 1925, his life was divided between two countries, Switzerland and France, as well as two centuries. In 1893, he joined the Nabis (‘Prophets’ in Hebrew), a group of young French artists, including Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis, who struck out in search of a new, highly decorative style. Within this group, Vallotton always remained le Nabi étranger, ‘The Stranger’. He was a contemporary of Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne and Matisse, but he followed his own path, not tied to any art movement, and his style and subject matter were utterly original.

Vallotton was a master of observation, a gloomy, bitter man who kept his distance from the world but was keenly aware of all its cruelties and absurdities. His paintings show everyday reality, but tinged with an unsettling atmosphere.

He presents his subjects with a detachment that contrasts with the deeper emotions he portrays.

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What is going on between the figures in these scenes? What is brewing underneath the smooth surface? What emotions lurk beneath his dis­ passion­ate style? In short, what is the ‘fire beneath the ice’ in Vallotton’s work, as the critic Claude Roger-Marx so aptly put it in 1955?

This book is being published in connection with the survey exhibition that opened very successfully at the Grand Palais in Paris, with a slightly smaller selection travelling on to Amsterdam and Tokyo.

It offers readers the opportunity to acquaint themselves with the work of this unique artist or renew an old acquaintance with it. The only previous major Vallotton exhibition in the Nether­ lands took place in the Van Gogh Museum in 1992, and we are proud that we can now give a new generation of visitors the chance to discover his fascinating oeuvre. In 2000 the Vincent van Gogh Foundation acquired a large collection of works on paper by the Nabis for the Van Gogh Museum.

This included ninety woodcuts by Vallotton. As a result, the Van Gogh Museum now possesses one

of the largest collections of woodcuts outside France and Switzerland. It was these prints that won Vallotton international fame in the 1890s.

They are groundbreaking works, unequalled in style and ambience. The exhibition in Amsterdam and the accompanying book include a broad selection of woodcuts from the collection of the Van Gogh Museum, presented in combination with Vallotton’s paintings.

First and foremost, we would like to thank the exhibition curators and the authors of this publica­ tion, Marina Ducrey and Katia Poletti, curators of the Félix Vallotton Foundation, and Isabelle Cahn, chief curator at the Musée d’Orsay. The three of them were responsible for the selection of works and the concept of the exhibition, and they high­ light themes that offer fresh insight into Vallotton’s oeuvre, his aesthetic, social and political pre­ occupa­tions, and his personality. We would also like to thank the curators and co-authors Nienke Bakker and Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho of the Van Gogh Museum, who were responsible for selecting the woodcuts for the Amsterdam exhibition.

The exhibition could not have taken place with­ out generous loans from many renowned public and private collections. We express our profound gratitude to all those who lent their works of art.

We also wish to thank our colleagues in Paris, Amsterdam and Tokyo for all the work they put into organising the exhibition. They made it possible to place this intriguing artist in the lime­ light in three major world cities.

Axel Rüger Director, Van Gogh Museum

Guy Cogeval President, Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie

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The Icy Vallotton?

Marina Ducrey

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FĂŠlix Jasinski Holding his Hat, 1887 Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 60.5 cm Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Antell Collections

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hen he died on 29 December 1925, Félix Vallotton left over 1,700 paintings, some 250 prints, hundreds of illustrations published in magazines and books, innumerable drawings (some of them studies and others works in their own right), a number of statuettes and orna­ mental objects, three novels, ten plays and around thirty reviews and essays on art. A remarkable achievement considering that the artist, who was born in Lausanne, in the canton of Vaud, on 28 December 1865, and became a French citizen in 1900, did it all over a period of only forty years.

His prints, especially his woodcuts, and his drawings for magazines and newspapers, created a sensation in 1890s Paris because of their caustic eloquence and unique style, before they went on spreading his fame through Europe and even across the Atlantic. While not yet thirty, he was one of the most sought-after illustrators of his time. As a painter, he was a highly respected figure in the Paris art world, notably as a founding member of the Salon d’Automne. Although not always understood by the critics, he saw many of his paintings acquired by famous French collectors through the dealers who supported him, first Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, then Galerie Druet. Although he sometimes complained that reviewers subjected him to ‘a slating watered down with friendliness’,1 he remained true to his vocation, that is, painting for painting’s sake, never thinking of following fashion or flattering collectors.

Vallotton’s diary, his letters, and the reports of those who knew him well portray a mixed picture of a man of average height, always neatly dressed, even when he was penniless, and very reserved in manner. He was egocentric and hyper­ sensitive, like many artists, sour and pessimistic, even depressed at times, but he was also passionate and sensual, highly intelli­ gent and cultivated, a brilliant conversationalist when among trusted friends, and strongly attracted to ‘women’s flesh’.2 ‘To Vallotton, painting was a great psychological adventure to which he gave himself heart and soul,’3 wrote the art critic Jacques de Laprade. It was an adventure, of course, that had a purpose: to create a body of work that was rooted in its time but was also part of an unbroken tradition and therefore encompassed every genre – portraits, interiors, nudes, land­ scapes, still lifes and even history paintings – but was, above all, original. And Vallotton indisputably achieved that purpose, in that he remains uncategorisable almost a century after his death. Nicknamed ‘The Stranger’ by the Nabis, he stood aside from all the art currents that emerged in France around the turn of the century, just as he stayed on the fringes of the contem­porary Swiss school. Given the impossibility of labelling him, his ‘difference’ is often put down to the fact that he straddled two centuries, two nations, two cultures. But he was not the only artist of whom that was true. His upbringing under the burden of Protestant ethics may rather explain that rigour and parsimoniousness, but also probity, respect for work, search for order and reluctance to display his feelings, had become part of his nature. On the other hand, it was in Paris that his personality developed. It was in the city’s libraries and museums that he acquired his erudition, sharpened his judgement in matters of art and established his preference for painters who were also master draughtsmen: Holbein,

‘My roots are in Paris’ Recognition in Paris, 1892–99

Katia Poletti

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Autumn in Paris Vallotton and the Salon d’Automne, 1903–25

Isabelle Cahn

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The Quintessence of Black and White The Woodcuts

Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho

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Themes

Idealism and Purity of Line

Isabelle Cahn

The specific characteristic of Vallotton’s painting, what strikes the viewer the first time he or she sees it, is the ascendancy of drawing over colour.

The motifs seem to be cut to shape, enclosed, joined together by a fine network of lines, in which the movement taken by the brushstroke matches that of the story told on the canvas, like a common thread that follows the complex pathways of the artist’s brain. The uniqueness of his painting made all the more powerful an impact on his contemporaries because the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were under the sway of colour, dominated by the first generation of the Impressionists, followed by the ‘scientific’ colourists and the Fauves.

‘Vallotton is the servant of the line’, noted his first biographer, Julius Meier-Graefe, in 1898.

‘He loves the line, and not only because he is a draughtsman; the few paintings he has made so far are also faithful reflections of that feeling.’

When he started to paint, the young man from the canton of Vaud drew on the dexterity of a hand

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that was already experienced in the practice of print­making and illustration. The line was for him the most immediate route from his thought to his painting, one that allowed him to retain the force and spontaneity of his observations, which made no claims to be purely objective. His elliptical manner was his way of expressing his dream of a humanism that was generous but often dis­ appointed by the dreariness of everyday middleclass life. The line represented the essence of his thoughts, and was the perfect tool for preserving the power of his intellectual analysis, taming his emotions in order to avoid outpourings of sentiment and mastering the subjective language of colour. Vallotton drew directly from his subject, taking a number of ‘shots’ from different angles, then painting in the studio, using these pencil sketches, sometimes combined with photographic sources or reproductions of other works. His practice of making a composition by assembling different elements meant he could avoid creating too literal a version of reality.

Flattened Perspectives

Marina Ducrey

‘The landscapes, for the most part, are very close to colour photography. That proves that it’s difficult’, wrote Jules Flandrin to the painter Lucien Mainssieux on 31 January 1912, speaking of the dozen landscapes included in Vallotton’s exhibition at Galerie Druet, among them Honfleur in the Mist (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy) and Last Rays (fig. 63). If his fellow painter had wished to check, he would surely have found it hard to identify on the ground a single one of the locations in Honfleur and its surroundings from which those landscapes could have been ‘photographed’.

Apollinaire was much nearer the mark, writing about the same exhibition in L’Intransigeant of 27 January 1912 that the landscapes led him to see Vallotton as a pupil of the Douanier Rousseau.

Rousseau’s jungles are, of course, purely imagi­­ nary, whereas Vallotton always based his land­ scapes on existing places after the turn of the century. But these were transformed according to the mental image he had created of the painting in progress, to the point of concealing the spot from

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which the sketch had been made. Stylistically, the metamorphoses thus generated are based on principles that go back to the woodcuts of the 1890s, when Vallotton moved away from realist representation to a decorative style that combined lines and flat surfaces, in a space freed from the rules of classical perspective.

The abrupt change in his style that took place in the autumn of 1891 may possibly have been connected with the publication in March of Albert Aurier’s notorious article ‘Le symbolisme en peinture’, which called for an art that was ‘ideistic’, decorative, and from which would be banished ‘concrete truth, illusionism and trompe-l’oeil’.

Objects would be carefully selected and represented only by ‘lines and shapes, general and distinctive colours’ that expressed their ‘ideistic meaning’. We almost hear the voice of Vallotton himself, dreaming in his Journal on 5 October 1916, of ‘painting detached from any literal adherence to nature’, of landscapes that would recreate his own emotions by means

Repression and Lies

Isabelle Cahn

Between 1897 and the early 1900s, Vallotton concentrated more or less exclusively on painting little scenes of everyday life, tragicomic pictures in which the figures are depicted in bourgeois domestic interiors. They are shown full face, in simplified – even stereotyped – settings like those of the light comedies of the day. To compose his interiors, he would move the furniture in his studio around; the same red armchair appears in several compositions executed around the turn of the century.

Vallotton does not make explicit the marital status of his figures – husband and wife, lover and mistress – but he presents a typology of love scenes, delivered with a strong dose of irony. The intense colours of the settings, the demonstrative gestures and postures of his figures reinforce the idea that a story is taking place behind closed doors, visualised as a sequence from the silent cinema. The voyeur who looks at it is more than happy. As an observer of a couple’s powerful drives and commonplace feelings, his attention

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is drawn to the accessories and knick-knacks that surround them like sentries, witnessing events and foretelling their inevitable consequences.

They are pieces of evidence that threaten the tran­quil­lity of these afternoon rendezvouses, putting into material form the protagonists’ guilt and probably, by a process of projection, that of the painter himself. Gustave Geffroy, in his discussion of the six Interiors (figs. 73 and 75) painted by Vallotton between 1897 and 1898 and exhibited together for the first time at the DurandRuel Gallery the following year, emphasises their essential function in these comedies, in which ‘not only do the characters play their parts exception­ ally well, but so do the pieces of furniture, which are so uniquely amusing, with their upholstery, their arrangement and the simplified existence they take on’ (Le Journal, 15 March 1899).

Vallotton sometimes used metonymy to allude to unseen events, as in the 1887 painting, The Top Hat (Musée André Malraux, Le Havre), in which he painted the portrait of a hat and a walking-stick

patiently waiting in an empty room, suggesting their owner’s amorous arrangement. His series on couples began ten years later, when he made ten woodcuts from drawings representing a variety of domestic scenes, arranged in a sequence in which cause does not lead directly to effect. His Intimités (fig. 72), thirty copies of which were published by La Revue blanche in 1899, belong to a time when Vallotton’s love life had undergone a dramatic change. His meeting some years earlier with Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, sister of the art dealers Josse and Gaston Bernheim, a young widow with three children, led him to turn his back on his youthful adventures and to end his relation­ ship with his mistress, Hélène Chatenay. While not autobiographical, this series reveals in the artist a disillusioned view of love in which the woman is represented as a cruel, frivolous, calculating, insatiable, arrogant creature. The man, who is bold in his sexual approaches, seems to be very quickly broken and defeated. Money plays a central role in the sexual contract, as in that

made by Jules Renard’s lovers in La Maîtresse, illustrated by Vallotton in 1896, a year before the Intimités.

In his comedies of love, as later in his novel La Vie meurtrière, Vallotton, whose self-control was legendary, broke through the smooth surface of repressed impulses. ‘We laugh, we shudder, we melt, we are infuriated, we tremble. A delicious, disturbing spectacle’, enthused Thadée Natanson in his article on the Intimités for La Revue blanche.

There is a real catharsis in this scathing attack on the impossibility of love, the buried wounds, the feelings of vengeance and hatred. Raymond Bouyer goes further still in his analysis of the pleasure – which is as intense today – that we take in these prints, even finding in them affinities with the ‘ravings of the Marquis de Sade’. Things always end in bitterness, given the mere fact of the powerful emotions that hold the lovers in their grip, but which soon pall under the banality of tea-time meetings, as the boredom and lack of communication that come in the wake of desire create an ever-widening gulf between the pro­ tagon­ists.

While Vuillard observed from a distance the private dramas played out in his extended family, Vallotton constructed his fictions as if through the lens of a ciné-camera, to expose the inevitable consequences of love. In the centre of The Red Room (fig. 75) we see an unreversed reflection in the mirror, placed over the fireplace that separates the sitting-room from the bedroom, of Vuillard’s Large Interior with Six Figures, which was inspired by the tragedy of adultery played out in his sister’s home. The presence of that painting, which Vallotton had recently received, is an en abyme representation of the perverse aspects of love, and a reminder of the unavoidable consequences of the lovers’ pleasure.

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Interior, 1900 Oil on cardboard, 55.5 x 30.5 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris

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Through this hidden labyrinth of emotions and impulses, repression and lies, Vallotton attacks the social neuroses surrounding marriage and money. His representation of complex psycho­­ logical processes occupies a central place in his work, in forms that may be symbolic, metonymic or dramatised but can always be released through humour, which offers us a glimpse of the unconscious.

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Chaste Suzanne, 1922 Oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm Musée cantonal des BeauxArts, Lausanne

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Interior, Woman in Blue Searching in a Cupboard, 1903 Oil on canvas, 81 x 46 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Interior with Woman in Red from Behind, 1903 Oil on canvas, 93 x 71 cm Kunsthaus Zürich

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The French-Swiss artist Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) was a member of the Nabis (‘Prophets’), a group of avant-garde artists working in fin-de-siècle Paris. The seemingly mundane scenes in his vivid and colourful paintings have an eerie, emotionally charged ambience veiled by a cool, detached style of painting: the ‘fire beneath the ice’.

He won international renown with his powerful black-andwhite woodcuts, which are unequalled not only in style and technique, but also in atmosphere. These prints have an under­ current of tension or menace and often combine humour with scathing social criticism.

Félix Vallotton was a keen observer who broke new artistic ground without abandoning tradition. But he was also a melan­­ cholic and bitter man, whose work brilliantly captured the cruelty and absurdity of the world around him.

ISBN 978 94 6226 054 2 www.vangoghmuseum.com www.lecturis.nl