Text by Dita Amory, Philippe Büttner, Ann Dumas, Patrick McGuinness, Katia Poletti, Christian Rümelin, Belinda Thomson.
Vallotton’s vivid, enigmatic and sometimes unsettling paintings and woodcuts made him a key commentator on the social mores of fin-de-siècle Paris
By the end of the 19th century, Paris was the unrivaled capital of the Western art world. Impressionism had transformed the visual arts and post-impressionism was flourishing in its wake; new boulevards and parks had modernized the city; theaters and department stores provided endless opportunities for entertainment and consumption. Artists were seen by many as the avant-garde of a new society.
Into this dynamic world arrived the 16-year-old Félix Vallotton, who became closely involved with a group of artists known as the Nabis, which included Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. Vallotton adopted their decorative painterly language, also sharing their interest in journalistic illustration and Japanese ukiyo-e prints. His paintings and woodcuts offered witty and often unsettling observations of domestic and political life, and he is now considered one of the greatest printmakers of his age. As his work evolved, the sharp realism and cool linearity of his later style made him one of the most distinctive artists of the early 20th century.
Generously illustrated throughout with the finest of his paintings and prints, this book accompanies a new presentation of Vallotton’s oeuvre in New York and London that includes works never before seen in public and aims to reevaluate his output and legacy. Texts by leading authorities on the artist look at his life, work and reception.
Swiss artist Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) was born in Lausanne, but spent much of his working life in France. Although he produced some of his most important work in Paris in the 1890s in painting and print, his original and innovative approach persisted throughout his career.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Félix Vallotton.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
The Telegraph
Lucy Davies
A grand survey...
Guardian
Laura Cumming
Vallotton’s scenes are almost proverbial in their miniature narratives.
Observer
Laura Cumming
Vallotton’s vision is uniquely strange…. there is almost invariably a narrative puzzle at their heart.
The Economist
Samuel Reilly
[His] paintings often communicate – through a sly glance or a turn away from the viewer – that sense of mystery and drama that gives Vallotton’s work its singular quality.
Financial Times
Jackie Wullschläger
The forgotten master of eerie estrangement...
London Review of Books
Bridget Alsdorf
He invites us to invade a fraught private moment, almost always between a man and a woman: a quarrel, a disappointment, an assignation.
Wall Street Journal
Brenda Cronin
Félix Vallotton brought a mordant eye to his scenes of Parisian life.
Hyperallergic
Hrag Vartanian
A brilliant pictorial wit, not just sardonic and sharp, as is often remarked, but full of sympathy…. his street scenes are alive with political tension and his interiors poke holes in the moral façade of the bourgeoisie.
Observer
Helen Holmes
Vallotton’s sensibility ... straddled two instincts: the desire to honestly illustrate class rage and the impulse to let images diffuse into abstract emotionality.
New York Times
Roberta Smith
As the first extensive Vallotton show in New York in decades, this exhibition is invaluable, despite its problems. It reintroduces an artist who achieved early greatness in the relatively modest medium of prints and then either failed or declined to follow a single path in painting. His work is a fascinating, frustrating thorn in the side of the modernist ideal of wholeness.
ARTnews
Chase Madar
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. But we’re lucky it was Vallotton, whose stark black-and-white prints, produced using matrices of soft pearwood, provide a singularly critical look at both private and public life.
MutualArt
Michael Pearce
The book provides an excellent introduction to the work of this remarkable designer, including a refreshing collection of his lively prints.
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The Theatre Box (La Loge de théâtre, le monsieur et la dame) (1909, oil on canvas, 46 x 38 cm, private collection), is reproduced from Félix Vallotton, published to accompany Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet, opening today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. First known for his acerbic, satiric wit and masterful woodcut prints, Vallotton moved towards painting and portraiture in the 1900s. “Although the domestic scenes and portraits that Vallotton embarked on around 1900 appear to signal a complete break with his work of the 1890s,” Dita Amory and Ann Dumas write, “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, in which, with the greatest economy, Vallotton manages to convey the sense of an illicit assignation rather than a bourgeois evening out.” continue to blog
Along with Roberta Smith at the New York Times and Brenda Cronin at the Wall Street Journal, we've eagerly awaited the opening of Félix Vallotton at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, en route from the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The first Vallotton retrospective in the United States in almost three decades, it's a sharp revelation, for the artist was one of the nineteenth century's greatest satirists of bourgeois mores. Cronin quotes curator Ann Dumas, who likens "Vallotton’s psychologically charged sensibility to that of director Alfred Hitchcock, who built mystery and suspense in his films." In regards to The Lie (Le Mensonge) (1897), featured here, Dumas notes Vallotton's ability to play with "ideas of deceit, betrayal, the darker side of social conventions, particularly of the Parisian bourgeoisie at the time… Clearly one of the protagonists is lying, but who is lying to whom and what about will always remain an enigma." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9 x 11 in. / 184 pgs / 150 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $62 ISBN: 9781912520046 PUBLISHER: Royal Academy of Arts AVAILABLE: 8/20/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by Royal Academy of Arts. Text by Dita Amory, Philippe Büttner, Ann Dumas, Patrick McGuinness, Katia Poletti, Christian Rümelin, Belinda Thomson.
Vallotton’s vivid, enigmatic and sometimes unsettling paintings and woodcuts made him a key commentator on the social mores of fin-de-siècle Paris
By the end of the 19th century, Paris was the unrivaled capital of the Western art world. Impressionism had transformed the visual arts and post-impressionism was flourishing in its wake; new boulevards and parks had modernized the city; theaters and department stores provided endless opportunities for entertainment and consumption. Artists were seen by many as the avant-garde of a new society.
Into this dynamic world arrived the 16-year-old Félix Vallotton, who became closely involved with a group of artists known as the Nabis, which included Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. Vallotton adopted their decorative painterly language, also sharing their interest in journalistic illustration and Japanese ukiyo-e prints. His paintings and woodcuts offered witty and often unsettling observations of domestic and political life, and he is now considered one of the greatest printmakers of his age. As his work evolved, the sharp realism and cool linearity of his later style made him one of the most distinctive artists of the early 20th century.
Generously illustrated throughout with the finest of his paintings and prints, this book accompanies a new presentation of Vallotton’s oeuvre in New York and London that includes works never before seen in public and aims to reevaluate his output and legacy. Texts by leading authorities on the artist look at his life, work and reception.
Swiss artist Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) was born in Lausanne, but spent much of his working life in France. Although he produced some of his most important work in Paris in the 1890s in painting and print, his original and innovative approach persisted throughout his career.
