Felix Vallotton by ACC Art Books

In his darkly suggestive paintings and graphically spare prints, Félix Vallotton created some of the most resonant images of fin-de-siècle Paris. Arriving in the city from his native Lausanne at the age of sixteen, the Swiss artist captured acerbic vignettes of bourgeois Parisian life, from the bustling, acquisitive crowds of the Bon Marché department store to illicit liaisons behind closed doors. He also created delicate still-lifes, nudes and portraits of family life, all imbued with a potent edge of disquiet.

c o nt r i b utor s Dita Amory is Curator in Charge and Administrator of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Philippe Büttner is Keeper of the Collection at Kunsthaus Zürich Ann Dumas is Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, London Patrick McGuinness is a novelist and poet, and Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford Katia Poletti is Curator at Fondation Félix Vallotton, Lausanne Christian Rümelin is Keeper of Prints and Drawings at Cabinet d’arts graphiques du Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva Belinda Thomson is a freelance art historian and Honorary Professor in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh

on the c ov e r : The Visit (La Visite), 1899 (detail of cat. 27) Distemper on cardboard, 55.5 × 87 cm Kunsthaus Zürich. Acquired 1899

Félix Vallotton

This volume considers Vallotton’s astonishingly original oeuvre, bringing together over fifty of his paintings, along with many of his most important print series, depicting subjects ranging from street demonstrations to the horror of the First World War. In authoritative essays exploring Vallotton’s innovative techniques and his complex position in the history of early modern art, the authors bring to life the work of this perpetually unsettling artist.

Félix Félix

Vallotton Vallotton

Contents

Foreword

Introduction: ‘The Very Singular Vallotton’

dita amory and ann dumas

Vallotton and fin-de-siècle France

patrick mcguinness

‘Le nabi étranger’

belinda thomson

Vallotton’s Visual Storytelling in the Time of Early Modernism

philippe büttner

‘This Baudelaire of wood-engraving’: Vallotton and the English-speaking Press at the Turn of the Century katia poletti

Printmaking as Artistic Accomplishment

C ATA L O G U E P L AT E S

christian rümelin

Chronology

164

Endnotes

174

Select Bibliography

176

Acknowledgements

178

Lenders to the Exhibition

178

Photographic Acknowledgements 179 Index 180

Foreword

The Swiss artist Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) created some of the most resonant images of fin-de-siècle Paris. Arriving in the city from Lausanne at the age of sixteen, Vallotton’s gifts were evident in his early realist paintings. But his true individuality emerged in astonishingly original and bitingly satirical prints: vignettes of Paris, life on the street, anarchist demonstrations, police brutality, le beau monde or the glittering counters of the Bon Marché department store. With the detached eye of an ironic outsider, he captured the darker side of bourgeois mores in enigmatic narratives that unfold in superb paintings and brilliantly reductive woodcuts. No less original are his later paintings – still-lifes, nudes and landscapes – magnetic in their controlled intensity and often imbued with a potent atmosphere of uneasiness. ‘Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet’ has been realised through a partnership between the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Fondation Félix Vallotton, Lausanne. The exhibition was conceived and curated by Ann Dumas at the Royal Academy and Dita Amory at The Met, with Katia Poletti, Curator of the Fondation Félix Vallotton, who, in her role as curatorial consultant to the exhibition and catalogue author, has made an invaluable contribution. We would also like to thank the former Curator of the Fondation, Marina Ducrey, author of the exemplary catalogue raisonné on which so much of our work for the exhibition has been based. We owe our deepest gratitude to the private collectors who have so generously lent paintings, drawings and prints to make this landmark survey possible. Swiss collectors and museums have been especially supportive, and particular gratitude is due to Christoph Becker and Philippe Büttner at the Kunsthaus Zürich, and to Jean-Yves Marin and Christian Rümelin at the Musée d’art et d’histoire de la Ville de Genève, Konrad Bitterli at the Kunst Museum Winterthur, as well as former director Dieter Schwarz, Bernard Fibicher and Catherine Lepdor at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Nina Zimmer at the Kunstmuseum Bern, and the former director Matthias Frehner and Dieter Thalmann at the Villa Flora, Winterthur. We would also like to express special thanks to Laurence des Cars and Isabelle Cahn at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, for their exceptional loans to the exhibition. We owe thanks to His Excellency Mr Martin Dahinden, 6

Ambassador of Switzerland to the US, His Excellency Mr Alexandre Fasel, Ambassador of Switzerland to the UK, David Kilian Beck, Head of Culture at the Embassy of Switzerland in the UK, as well as to Elena Bänninger, Matthias Dettling and the Consulate General of Switzerland, New York City. Many members of the two institutions have contributed to the success of this endeavour. We would like to acknowledge at the RA: Anna Testar, Assistant Curator; Rebecca England, Exhibitions Manager; and Jess Reid and Catherine Coates, Assistant Exhibitions Managers. At The Met, we thank Daniel H. Weiss, our President and CEO, for his support of this exhibition and his wise counsel. We also note the efforts of Quincy Houghton, Deputy Director for Exhibitions; Christine McDermott, Exhibitions Project Manager; Caroline Partamian, Associate for Administration; and Nina Maruca, Senior Associate Registrar, in seeing this project to fruition. The exhibition’s design was realised by Ian Gardner in London and Daniel Kershaw in New York. We extend our appreciation to RA Publications for producing this inspiring catalogue, designed by Maggi Smith. We thank Dita Amory, Philippe Büttner, Ann Dumas, Patrick McGuinness, Katia Poletti, Christian Rümelin and Belinda Thomson for their contributions to the catalogue. We are, as always, most grateful to our exhibition supporters: Jaeger-LeCoultre and The Pictet Group, who have supported the exhibition at the RA, and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, who have supported the exhibition at both the RA and The Met. In addition, we thank the Janice H. Levin Fund, The Florence Gould Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, especially its President, Philip Isles, and the Marlene and Spencer Hays Foundation for making possible The Met’s presentation. One of the most original artists of his time, Félix Vallotton pursued his own path outside the mainstreams of modernism. We hope that this exhibition will accord him the attention he deserves and that our visitors will discover the unique qualities of this brilliant and singular artist. Christopher Le Brun PRA President, Royal Academy of Arts Max Hollein Director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Introduction: ‘The Very Singular Vallotton’

dita amory and ann dumas

Detail of cat. 15

Félix Vallotton is a confounding presence in the narrative of early modern art. A native of Switzerland, he moved to Paris at the age of sixteen, trading the conservatism of Swiss culture for a vibrant modern city.2 Artists from everywhere were flocking to Paris for its art academies, its museums, the camaraderie of fellow art students, and a society on the eve of extraordinary change.3 Despite his financially straitened circumstances as a young expatriate, Vallotton immersed himself in Parisian life. He attended the Académie Julian, where he trained under the painters Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. In 1900, he even attained French citizenship. Yet Vallotton remained fundamentally Swiss. His austere Protestant upbringing and his rigorous discipline as an artist reflect this heritage. The concentration of his art in Swiss collections, public and private, offers further evidence of his appeal to a Swiss sensibility. No study of Swiss art can neglect Vallotton’s contribution to an impressive lineage, one that often begins with Angelica Kauffman and closes with the Giacometti family and Ferdinand Hodler. Yet, we are hard pressed to find Vallotton mentioned in any critical discussion of the succession of radical art movements that gripped Paris toward the end of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth. Admittedly, he has a part in any discussion of the Nabis. He was a close friend of Edouard Vuillard, and maintained ties with Pierre Bonnard for years after the Nabi artists went their separate ways. They called him ‘the foreign Nabi’. Like them, Vallotton was an attentive observer of contemporary life in the French capital. Yet, his unsparing caricatural illustrations of Parisian society ultimately set him apart. While the Nabis were usually drawn to evocative interiors, Vallotton’s ‘intimiste’ masterpieces on cardboard and paper were designed to satirise the French bourgeoisie. In dynamic, veiled language, he chiselled scenes of adultery, duplicity and hypocrisy. Social critique proliferated in Parisian periodicals through the last decade of the nineteenth century, and nowhere more prominently than in the literary magazine La Revue blanche, to which Vallotton was a frequent contributor.4 Vallotton’s was a singular voice, articulated and amplified through his now legendary printmaking. He is credited with reviving the woodcut tradition, which dimmed after Dürer and Schongauer made their indelible marks on the Renaissance. ‘This newcomer, who is not a beginner, engraved on blocks of soft pearwood various scenes of contemporary life with the candour of a sixteenth-century woodcut,’ wrote the critic Octave Uzanne in 1892.5 Vallotton’s messaging was as powerful as his aesthetic touch. Using no colour, his woodcuts produced sharply reductive imagery, undifferentiated jet black against passages of pristine white – a voyeuristic lens on a society in flux. The police are rebuked; innocent bystanders fall victim to carriage accidents; suicides multiply. Such was Vallotton’s acerbic wit that newly established anarchist political journals solicited his contributions. Success brought fame and welcome financial security. Yet for all the satire and social anarchism embedded in his prints, Vallotton did not live by his polemics. In 1899, he married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, a widow and a member of the prominent Bernheim-Jeune family of art dealers. Not only did this union guarantee

his economic security, it was to provide him with marketing outlets ever afterwards. He settled into haut-bourgeois circles, now a husband and a reluctant stepfather, and soon gave up printmaking for a lifetime of painting, pivoting from politics in print to a quiet studio practice. Vallotton remained steadfastly committed to his art, realising an œuvre of 1,700 paintings, among them portraits, interiors, nudes, landscapes and still-lifes; some 250 prints; more than 1,000 magazine and book illustrations; three novels; eight plays; and assorted ephemeral and decorative commissions.

Early years in Lausanne and Paris Félix Vallotton was born in Lausanne on 28 December 1865 to a Protestant family of French origin. His father ran a hardware store. Félix studied Latin and Greek at the Collège cantonal de Lausanne but abandoned a classical education to pursue a career in art. He moved to Paris in January 1882, enrolling at the Académie Julian. He chose admission to the Académie over the Ecole des Beaux-Arts because it offered greater freedom. It also offered the company of many foreign artists, such as the Polish engraver Félix Jasinski, whose dashing portrait Vallotton was later to paint (cat. 2), and the painter and engraver Charles Maurin, who took the young Vallotton under his wing at the Académie. Despite support and encouragement from his friends and teachers, Vallotton’s early years in Paris were solitary and financially challenging. He left the Académie Julian in 1885, the year he successfully submitted a painting to the official Salon.6 At some time in the 1880s he took up with a young model, Hélène Chatenay. They may have shared Vallotton’s small apartment on the Rue Jacob, where Hélène often posed for the artist. Woman in a Purple Dress Under the Lamp (1898; cat. 21) – an interior reminiscent of the densely painted, stilled settings of the Nabi artists – probably features a haunting Hélène seated before Vuillard’s masterpiece Large Interior with Six Figures (1897; fig. 32), a recent gift from Vuillard.7 Woman in a Purple Dress is emblematic of a major transition in Vallotton’s life and art. A year after it was painted, he abandoned his petite amie and their modest lifestyle for marriage to the cossetted Gabrielle. Thereafter Gabrielle and her family populate many of his finest interors, pictures that expose the unsettling silence and sense of isolation we have come to recognise in his narratives. One need only glance at the strange, penumbral interactions of Dinner by Lamplight (1899; cat. 31) or The Visit by Lamplight (1899–1900; cat. 30) to appreciate the social climate of Vallotton’s new surroundings.

The early 1890s The early 1890s witnessed a radical development in Vallotton’s work. The meticulous realism that he had perfected in his portraits and interiors during his first decade in Paris culminated in his beautifully observed The Sick Girl (1892; cat. 4), which reflects his admiration for the linear clarity of the Northern tradition and the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century. But within just a few months, he began work on an entirely different kind of painting, Bathing on a Summer Evening (1892–93; cat. 7), in which he broke definitively with his early work of the 1880s. At the Salon des Indépendants of 1893 Bathing on a Summer Evening was greeted with derisive hilarity by conservative critics and a public who had never seen anything like it before and were unable to grasp its astonishing originality or to discern the wealth of sources, from Cranach, Hodler, Ingres, Puvis de Chavannes and, most obviously, Japanese

Fig. 1 UTAMARO KITAGAWA Courtesans (Eight Views of the Beauties of Shimada), c. 1800. Colour wooduct, 36 × 25.2 cm. Private collection

(former Collection of Félix Vallotton)

plays the role of mistress of the house in a group of domestic interiors in which we find Vallotton, like Bonnard and Vuillard, replacing his synthetic style with a broad painterly naturalism (cats 32, 33).17 In his portrait of Gabrielle Vallotton (1905; cat. 29), however, we can already discern the smooth, flawless surface and meticulous contours that, together with the pose, white dress and paisley shawl, clearly pay homage to Ingres, Vallotton’s artistic idol. Although the domestic scenes and portraits that Vallotton embarked on around 1900 appear to signal a complete break with his work of the 1890s, the subversive, caustic wit that is so brilliantly exploited in the Intimacies woodcuts resurfaces in a handful of later paintings such as The Theatre Box (1909; cat. 38) in which, with the greatest economy, Vallotton manages to convey the sense of an illicit assignation rather than a bourgeois evening out. Equally, in The Provincial, the submissive young man – perhaps he is the obliging and well-dressed shop assistant in the left-hand panel of The Bon Marché Department Store (1898; cat. 20) – falls prey to another even more predatory femme fatale in an even bigger black hat adorned with a single white plume. Marriage with the daughter of Alexandre Bernheim-Jeune gave Vallotton access to one of the most prominent galleries in Paris. The Galerie Bernheim-Jeune hosted two solo exhibitions for him, and he featured in many more alongside the Nabis. Alexandre and his sons, Josse and Gaston, even commissioned his work for their own collections, and for gallery stock. Vallotton left Bernheim-Jeune to join Eugène Druet in 1910, wanting a platform for sales beyond his immediate family. Some years later, his brother, Paul Vallotton, opened a branch of Bernheim-Jeune in their native Lausanne, from which many of Félix’s paintings entered Swiss private collections. Vallotton could now count among his collectors Hedy Hahnloser and Leo Stein. Hedy did more than anyone else to promote Vallotton in Switzerland. She collected his art, encouraged sales and ultimately wrote one of his early biographies. Leo Stein’s sister Gertrude may not have shared her brother’s enthusiasm for Vallotton’s art, but she agreed to sit for one of his most powerful portraits (cat. 17). She had sat for Picasso the year before (fig. 5), and Vallotton seems to have risen to the challenge. Gertrude Stein’s longstanding partner Alice B. Toklas recounted in her ‘autobiography’ how Vallotton worked the canvas: When he painted a portrait he made a crayon sketch and then began painting at the top of the canvas straight across. Gertrude Stein said it was like pulling down a curtain as slowly moving as one of his Swiss glaciers. Slowly he pulled the curtain down and by the time he was at the bottom of the canvas, there you were. The whole operation took about two weeks and then he gave the canvas to you.18 More often than not, Vallotton’s new family featured in his enigmatic interiors of mid-career. Gabrielle often modelled for her husband in their early years of marriage, sitting alongside her relatives. Although these glimpses of domesticity offer no reassurance of blissful dialogue, they do signal changes in the artist’s aesthetics. Volume and spatial definition return to his interiors. He takes up sculpture in 1904, modelling several small nudes. And he increasingly uses photographs – Kodak camera snapshots – as aidesmémoires. One collateral photograph shows Gabrielle seated by a fireplace in an interior; this served as the source for the painting The Red Room, Etretat (1899; cat. 28).19 Vallotton also used snapshots of outdoor imagery as source material for his studio practice, especially in the summer in Normandy (figs 6 and 7).

Fig. 5 PABL O PICASSO Gertrude Stein, 1905–06. Oil on canvas, 100 × 81.3 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946

Fig. 6 View taken from a window at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, 1899. Photograph by Félix Vallotton. Archives Edouard Vuillard, Private collection

Fig. 7 The Ball (Le Ballon), 1899 (cat. 35). Oil on cardboard mounted on wood, 48 × 61 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Bequest of Carle Dreyfus, 1953

Fig. 8 The Rape of Europa (L’enlèvement d’Europe), 1908. Oil on canvas, 130 × 162 cm. Kunstmuseum Bern

Fig. 9 Hatred (La Haine), 1908. Oil on canvas, 206 × 146 cm. Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva

The nude

Fig. 10 JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES The Turkish Bath (Le Bain turc), 1852–59/1862. Oil on canvas glued to wood, 206 × 146 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Gift of the Société des Amis du Louvre, with the aid of Maurice Fenaille, 1911

Scenes of social satire are, however, rare in Vallotton’s later work and after 1910, with few exceptions, portraits are scarce in his œuvre. From around 1904 onwards, the female nude became Vallotton’s principal subject. The unique, cool, hard-edged style that makes the later nudes so distinctive results from a determined detachment – the fact that he did not paint from the model, but from memory and imagination, relying on a single sketch drawn from life.20 The nudes were controversial in Vallotton’s own time and remain so today, enthusiasts admiring their flawless classicism and detractors attacking their dry frigidity. Whereas some detected a powerful eroticism beneath their icy façades, others saw in Vallotton’s ruthless gaze a desire mingled with repulsion or even misogyny.21 The nude gave Vallotton the opportunity to take up the challenge of such hallowed mythological subjects as The Rape of Europa (1908; fig. 8). In a group of bizarre mythological paintings on a grand scale 22 he pursued the complexities and ambiguities of relationships between the sexes – a predominant theme for Vallotton, and one that he explored in the Intimacies prints and related paintings, in his novel La Vie meurtrière (The Murderous Life)23 and, most unflinchingly, in Hatred (1908; fig. 9). Despite their mixed reception, it was with the nude that Vallotton defined himself and intended to make his mark at the Salon. Models Resting (1905; cat. 39) was his major submission to the Salon d’Automne of 1905, which also included a debut exhibition of the Fauves, led by Matisse, and an Ingres retrospective. Although the nudes reflect his admiration for such linear artists of the Northern tradition as Cranach, Ingres’s example was paramount: Vallotton is said to have wept in front of Ingres’s The Turkish Bath (1852–59/1862; fig. 10). The serene and beautifully composed Models Resting and Nude Holding Her Gown (1904; cat. 41) emulate Ingres’s classical coolness, impeccable contours and smooth surfaces. Yet Vallotton’s nudes do not look like them: their unsettling edge and disturbing hyperrealism place them firmly in the first quarter of the twentieth century rather than in the nineteenth. Vallotton was not alone in this focus on the nude. The theme was central for a number of artists, among them Degas, Renoir and Cézanne, who in the early years of the twentieth century sought to place themselves in the great tradition of French classical painting. Yet, much as Vallotton admired the classical tradition, especially as it was transmitted through Ingres, the cold objectivity of his later nudes removes him utterly from the painterly sensuality of the naturalism that predominated in much French painting of the time. An

Fig. 20 Little Angels (Petits anges), 1894. Woodcut, 14.9 × 24.5 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

crowd of protesters flees an unseen onslaught (presumably of gendarmes). We note, for instance, the social variety of the crowd, as well as the fear, conveyed in the way they lean forward in panic, and the swaying old man at the front of the image, left behind, his hat on the ground. We even see the tacks in the heels of the shoes of the men as they run away – Vallotton has a knack for compressed symbolic yet realist detail. The crowd was, or could be, dangerous: Zola’s novels, for instance, depicted the animalistic power of the crowd as a single entity able to turn into a murderous riot in an instant. Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des Foules (published in English as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind) appeared in 1895, developing Gabriel Tarde’s ideas in Les Lois de l’imitation (1890) about the crowd being the organism in which human individualism melts into the herd instinct. In Vallotton’s images, the crowd could be dangerous, anarchic, riotous, or it could be harmlessly queuing outside a shop or peacefully waiting for a bus. It could comprise mourners at a funeral, bystanders watching a body dredged from the water, a crowd of umbrellas mushrooming up against the rain. The crowd could also be happy or enthralled, as in The Bon Marché Department Store (1893; cat. 20), where elegant women peruse fabrics in France’s iconic emporium. Here, the crowd is fashionable, wealthy, at ease; Vallotton depicts the leisure, the otium and the consumer desire that Zola described in his 1883 novel Au Bonheur des dames. In one of his most ambiguous woodcuts, Little Angels (fig. 20) (the title is ironic), a crowd of primary-schoolchildren follows a gendarme as he grips a louche-looking, hirsute man by the shoulder. The noise of the scene is powerfully suggested not just by its dynamism but (in a way that reminds us of Munch) by the children’s wide-open, clamouring black mouths and round black eyes: baying mob-in-waiting or innocents bursting with energy and curiosity? If Vallotton could find ambiguity even in the most outwardly spectacular moments of life, he was also adept at suggesting the more inward dramas of private life. In his Intimacies series for issues of La Revue blanche, all the theatre and spectacle of the badauderie woodcuts has been inverted and internalised. These are considered by some to be Vallotton’s masterpieces, not least because they seem to be doing, in art, what the Symbolist writers strove for in their poems and plays. The art of suggestion lies in doing more with less, and in this series it seems that Vallotton has achieved in art what Mallarmé sought in poetry: ‘to evoke, in a precise shadow, the unspoken object’.12 What Mallarmé meant was that a poem’s power lay not in statement but in evocation, and that Symbolist poetry was a form of verbal chiaroscuro. In contemporary drama, Maeterlinck – for whom Vallotton’s Nabi

comrade Vuillard designed stage sets and backdrops – had created a theatre of shadows, plays punctuated by silences, in which events tended to happen either offstage or out of sight on underlit stages. Vallotton’s Intimacies are part of this aesthetic; though his interiors are bourgeois interiors and the men and women of his pictures are bourgeois spouses and lovers, there is always a sense that the key to the action lies somewhere in the darkness: the judiciously shadowed face, the dark side of the room, the cut-off frame, past the bedstead towards the bed we cannot quite see. Vallotton’s titles are often suggestive or ironic; for instance the Intimacy entitled Cinq heures, or Five O’Clock (cat. 24), sounds bland enough in English, but has a different resonance when we know that in French ‘cinq à sept’ means the period in the day that one spends with one’s lover or mistress. A similar eye for the underside of bourgeois respectability is evidenced in Vallotton’s illustrations for Jules Renard’s 1895 play La Maîtresse (fig. 26). Instead of the eye-catching street theatre of Parisian street life, Intimacies are dark micro-dramas of emotional violence, deceit, greed, hypocrisy, disappointment and misogyny. Instead of the crowd, we have the basic unit of social and biological life: the couple behind closed doors. In these pictures, Vallotton is less a passer-by than a peeper, a voyeur, a spy. Vallotton reminds us that the period of Zola and Gustave Le Bon was also the period of Freud and Charcot, mapping the pathologies of private life. The same skill lies behind one of Vallotton’s most famous paintings, The Theatre Box (1909; cat. 38): a man in the shadows, face only partially visible, with his eyes on a woman who sits ahead of him to his left with her delicate gloved hand resting on the balustrade. We cannot see the eyes, but it is not a benign look. Her face, bathed in the shadow of her hat’s rim, is striking for the big eyes, sad and worried, and the downturned mouth. Her hand comes out towards us, half-clenched, casting its shadow on the bright yellow of the theatre box. The way Vallotton divides the space is reminiscent of the composition of his woodcuts: a block of darkness against a block of light, with the dividing line between the two, the edge of the box, running obliquely upwards from left to right. Neither figure is watching the play – this drama is not on stage but rather suggested in the unspoken relationship between them, which is fraught with sadness and menace. The Revue blanche was one of the most cosmopolitan, edgy and innovative magazines of the period, and Vallotton’s association with it brought him into the heart of literary Paris. The magazine was notable for the way it mixed – in ways that seem to us unthinkable today – poems, reviews, political and economic reporting, original art, short stories, translations and radical polemics. To read an issue was not just to be well-informed about the latest play or fashions, but to grapple with a poem by Mallarmé appearing on the same page as an extract of Karl Marx or an analysis of the latest banking scandal. The magazine, edited by the Natanson brothers, was especially welcoming to the Nabi artists, and thanks in part to its editorial secretary, the art critic, dandy and anarchist Félix Fénéon, was well known for its political radicalism. It often ran foul of the ‘lois scélerates’, but the only occasion when it took fright and backed away from publishing a text was Saint-PolRoux’s (now-lost) celebration of the assassination of President Sadi Carnot by an anarchist in June 1894. By the time it closed in 1903, Vallotton had contributed images to over sixty issues of La Revue blanche and was one of its most valued contributors. When Remy de Gourmont began the two volumes of Le Livre des masques, a ‘Who’s Who’ of Symbolism that remains a canonical sourcebook to this day, it was Vallotton he sought out as his illustrator. Mallarmé himself wrote to Vallotton asking for a portrait of Rimbaud for his 1896 essay on the poet for The Chap-Book, a Chicago magazine.13 It is

‘Le nabi étranger’ belinda thomson

Detail of cat. 19

The Nabi group, to which Félix Vallotton is invariably, albeit somewhat problematically, linked, first came together in 1888 at the Académie Julian in Paris.1 The leading lights at the start of that autumn term were Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Henri-Gabriel Ibels and Pierre Bonnard, but their galvaniser was Paul Sérusier, slightly older than the others and more authoritative (he was the massier, or monitor, of the studio). Sérusier’s enthusiastic advocacy of the anti-naturalistic, synthetist painting being developed by Paul Gauguin, whom he had just met in Brittany, fired up his friends’ dissatisfaction with the unimaginative descriptive naturalism they were being taught to emulate by their teachers, which typically involved painstaking chiaroscuro aided by photography. From Gauguin came evidence of the possibility of pursuing a higher, more spiritual notion of art. His radical methods comprised bold colours applied flatly within simplified contours. Seeing Sérusier’s small Landscape in the Bois d’Amour (1888; fig. 23), painted under Gauguin’s instructions, was a moment of revelation, even though this ‘Talisman’ (as they dubbed it) was essentially an embryonic demonstration of certain subjective principles in the application of colour, not typical of Gauguin’s synthetist style. Gauguin had challenged Sérusier with a series of questions: ‘How do you see that tree – green isn’t it? Then paint it with the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, blueish? Then don’t be afraid to paint it as blue as possible,’ and so on.2 Sérusier and Denis were to refine these rudimentary ideas into a cogent theory over the following months – Sérusier returning to Brittany to spend further time with Gauguin in 1889 – and their analytical formulation, enhanced by painterly experiments and revised thinking about the art of the past and the present, particularly the art of Fra Angelico and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, resulted, in 1890, in Denis’s reasoned, twenty-five-point article-cum-manifesto, ‘Définition du néo-traditionnisme’.3 Art was not about trompe l’œil, but about transcribing subjective emotion through musical harmonies and decorative arabesques, finding symbolic equivalents for ideas. In the meantime the new devotees had secretly adopted ‘half as a joke, half seriously’ the esoteric name ‘Nabis’ – Hebrew for prophets – to capture the sense they had of being the initiates of a radical new form of art and to differentiate them from their peers.4 They met in a bistro and, on Saturday afternoons, in the large studio of Paul Ranson in the Boulevard Montparnasse. New adherents were welcomed in short order, Edouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel joining in 1890 (both had been schoolfellows of Denis at the Lycée Condorcet), the Dutchman Jan Verkade in 1891. The ‘Nabi’ nomination was broad enough to include a few sympathisers from other disciplines, such as the Hebrew scholar Auguste Cazalis, the musician Pierre Hermant and the poet Paul Percheron, and it was conferred upon their mostly absent ‘master’ Gauguin, who occasionally joined their discussions over the winter of 1890–91 prior to departing for Tahiti. Later recruits included the Roussillon painter Aristide Maillol, the Hungarian painter József Rippl-Rónai and the Swiss painter-printmaker Félix Vallotton. Given that the name ‘Nabi’ was not disclosed or used as a public identification and that Vallotton seems to make no mention of the event in his published correspondence,

Early Years in Paris

4 The Sick Girl (La Malade), 1892 Oil on canvas, 73.5 × 100.5 cm Kunsthaus Zürich. Association of Zürich Art Friends, Bequest of Dr H. U. Doerig, with the contribution of Annette Bühler, 2016

5 The Coffee Service (Le Service à café), 1887 Oil on canvas, 41 × 33 cm Private collection

6 The Cook (La Cuisinière), 1892 Oil on board, 33 × 41 cm Collection of Marlene and Spencer Hays New York only

108

39 Models Resting (Le Repos des modèles), 1905 Oil on canvas, 130 × 195.5 cm Kunst Museum Winterthur. Donated by Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler, Lisa Jaeggli-Hahnloser and Prof. Dr Hans R. Hahnloser, 1946 London only

146

82 The Symphony (La Symphonie), 1897 Woodcut on paper, 44.6 × 58.8 cm Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva; Cabinet d’arts graphiques. Gift of Lucien Archinard

on the c ov e r : The Visit (La Visite), 1899 (detail of cat. 27) Distemper on cardboard, 55.5 × 87 cm Kunsthaus Zürich. Acquired 1899

Félix Vallotton

Félix Félix

Vallotton Vallotton