CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/26/2019

The economy and wit of Félix Vallotton

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, the enlightening new release from Royal Academy of Arts, whose current Vallotton exhibition will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in October 2019. 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.”