CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/10/2019

Surprising 'Félix Vallotton' is on view at The Met

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."