This Swiss artist was a perplexing and anomalous player in Parisian art circles, referred to as le nabi étranger (the foreign Nabi). The sharp, precise contrasts that he’d developed in his print-making informed his Nabist painting technique.
Vallotton’s art of the mid-1890s aligned with their decorative patterning, informal technique, and extreme color contrasts, as he had already begun producing wood cuts inspired by the flat colors and silhouetted forms of Japanese ukiyo-e prints. Forswearing illusions of depth and three-dimensionality, they abandoned linear perspective and modeling. Stylistic revolutionaries, the Nabis took inspiration from the Post-Impressionist style of Paul Gauguin, and popular Japanese woodblock prints. (The name Nabis was derived from the Arabic for “prophet”). While creating illustrations for the avant-garde journal La Revue blanche, he met members of the Nabis circle, Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard in particular. His work may have been inspired by real-life demonstrations, but despite the obvious political nature of these scenes, the artist’s stance on the action represented often remains ambiguous.įélix Vallotton, Le Bon Marché, 1893 Woodcut on wove paper
Vallotton found by skillfully manipulating the high contrast of black and white the relief-printmaking process of woodcut was a particularly powerful medium to illustrate political and satirical tension in his works, even in small-scale images. We understand the drive to try to enhance the relevance of the exhibition to a present-day audience, but to interpret his work through the lens of today’s politically-charged attitudes may distort understanding of the historical reality of Vallotton’s world, and overstate the extent of his anarchic proclivities. The curators of the exhibition make much of Vallotton’s revolutionary tendencies. Félix Vallotton, La manifestation, 1893 woodcutĪlthough he was intensely critical of the values of the Paris upper class, it seems Vallotton gave expression to his political views entirely through ironic artistic statements.
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