Felix vallotton christie swanson

The Swiss-born artist was a singular figure who made art in his own distinctive way — to compelling effect. Two ingenious landscapes and one of his celebrated ‘Intérieurs avec figures’ are offered in London from the Sam Josefowitz Collection

‘That very strange Vallotton’ — it was with such words that Thadée Natanson, the publisher of La Revue blanche magazine, described the artist Félix Vallotton.

Similarly, his peers among the Nabis — a radical group of painters with whom he was briefly associated — dubbed Vallotton ‘le Nabi étranger’. In part, this reflected the fact that he was ‘foreign’: Swiss-born, where the rest of the group was French. However, it probably also conveyed a second meaning of étranger as strange, or different.

Vallotton was a singular figure in the art of late-19th-century and early-20th-century France. For one thing, he was a novelist, a playwright, a restorer of paintings, an obituarist and an art critic, in addition to what we might call his day job. He also — despite working at a time when styles such as Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Fauvism were steering the course of modern painting — made art in very much his own way. And what a compelling way that was.

Félix Vallotton in the garden of the Relais, the Natansons’ house in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. Photo: © Archives Charmet / Bridgeman Images

In the decades after his death, one of Vallotton’s keenest admirers was the collector Sam Josefowitz. This autumn, several works by the artist will be offered from his collection, beginning with Masterpieces from the Collection of Sam Josefowitz: A Lifetime of Discovery and Scholarship on 13 October 2023 in London, followed by sales in Paris on 20 and 21 October, and online.

‘I wouldn’t have any worries about his future’

Félix Edouard Vallotton was born into a Protestant family in the Swiss city of Lausanne in 1865. He left for Paris aged 16, where he enrolled at the Académie Julian. His early interest lay in portraiture, and in 1885 his work was exhibited publicly for the first time, when two of his paintings were accepted into the Salon.

Yet such progress wasn’t enough to ease the financial strains that his family were undergoing back in Switzerland.

Felix’s teacher at the academy, Jules Joseph LeFebvre, wrote a letter to the young man’s father, saying that ‘if I had a son like yours, I wouldn’t have any worries about his future or hesitate to make new sacrifices… to assist him in his work’.

By the end of the 1880s, however, Vallotton’s father could no longer support him. This forced the artist to seek his own income, and it’s in such a context that we should (at least partly) see his successes as a printmaker in the following decade.

The woodcuts: taking aim at the establishment

Vallotton is credited, alongside Gauguin, with helping revive the tradition of the woodcut, which had declined significantly since the Renaissance. Rejecting colour, he produced strikingly simplified scenes in which passages of thick, velvety black were offset by areas of paper left empty and white.

To go with his technical virtuosity, Vallotton showed a biting wit. As a result, he was an artist in demand at a time when politically themed periodicals were proliferating across Paris. (This proliferation was down to the advent of photomechanical printing processes, plus a recent law granting freedom of the press.)

Vallotton created images for a range of periodicals, including L’Assiette au Beurre, Le Rire and Le Courrier français and, most frequently, La Revue blanche. Today his woodcuts are highly esteemed — though at the time what mattered was that they were a way of making a good living.

Vallotton portrayed scenes of public and private life in contemporary Paris, often taking aim at some element or other of the establishment in the process. Subjects included violent policemen, a man trying to resist execution, and overzealous shoppers seeking luxury goods.

Félix Vallotton (1865-1925), Money (L’Argent), 1897, from the portfolio ‘Intimacies’ (Intimités), 1897-98. Woodcut. 7 x 8⅞ in (17.8 x 22.5 cm). Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence

Perhaps best-known of all, though, are domestic vignettes such as Money — part of a psychologically loaded series of images of couples behind closed doors, called ‘Intimacies’ (1897-98).

Vallotton floods three-quarters of the plate with unmodulated black ink, the only figurative element appearing in the far left, where a woman stares out of a window. A man, emerging out of the dark expanse to her right, stretches out his hand towards her. Some transaction is taking place, but we’re left to guess precisely what.

Vallotton’s masterpieces: the ‘Intérieurs avec figures’

Executed at the same time as ‘Intimacies’ were a parallel set of paintings collectively called ‘Intérieurs avec figures’. These, too, depicted rendezvous in haut bourgeois apartments, and are widely recognised as Vallotton’s masterpieces.

They were exhibited at Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1899 and are marked by an atmosphere of sexual tension in airless, claustrophobic rooms. Examples include The Red Room, The Visit and Five O’Clock, the last of which is also known by its French title, Cinq heures.

It depicts a couple in a close embrace on a red armchair. We cannot see their faces, and a combination of bulky furniture and cluttered books and papers surrounding them adds to a sense of concealment about their liaison. It has been suggested that the painting’s title alludes to a French phrase for an extramarital affair, cinq à sept. (Businessmen were said to visit their mistresses between 5pm and 7pm, the time of day between leaving the office and heading home.)

With their raking light effects, there’s something theatrical about the ‘Intérieurs avec figures’. One can well believe that Vallotton was the writer of eight plays. He thrusts the viewer into the midst of a narrative, which is all the more intriguing for being unresolved.

In the case of Cinq heures, are the couple paramours or (less likely) a husband and wife? Whose apartment is it? Who has initiated the liaison? And so on.

For much of the 1890s, Vallotton was affiliated with the Nabis. However, although his art shared a number of characteristics with theirs, such as the decorative flattening of forms, he injected his scenes with a narrative tension that was quite distinct.

He suggests but never explains, and leaves viewers in the role of voyeur, trying to work out what fraught, private moment we are spying upon. Sometimes it seems to involve a quarrel, sometimes a letdown, sometimes a tryst. The impact is heightened by Vallotton’s close cropping — a device also employed in Japanese ukiyo-e prints, which he greatly admired.

Félix Vallotton (1865-1925), Gabrielle Vallotton assise dans un rocking chair, 1902. Oil on board mounted on cradled panel. 18⅛ x 23¼ in (46 x 59.1 cm). Estimate: €180,000-250,000. Offered in La Collection Sam Josefowitz: Vente du Soir on 20 October 2023 at Christie’s in Paris

‘I flounder in the goings-on’

Vallotton continued to paint enigmatic interior scenes in the years after his ‘Intérieurs avec figures’. Most critics interpret his pictures of this type as a satire on the moral hypocrisy of the haute bourgeoisie. Interestingly, the artist opted to join that class himself in 1899, when he married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, a wealthy young widow with three children.

They settled into a nice apartment in the Bois de Boulogne and spent summers in a house in the coastal town of Honfleur in Normandy. It wasn’t unhelpful that Gabrielle’s family were art dealers who ran the important Bernheim-Jeune gallery. This provided Vallotton with both economic security and a constant outlet for his paintings. After marrying, he could afford to all but give up his print work.

Gabrielle would serve as a model for many of his paintings, but their union was never exactly serene. After a few years together, Vallotton wrote in a letter that he had grown tired of his wife’s busy social life and noisy children. ‘I love seclusion, silence, ripened thoughts, and rational activity,’ he said, ‘but here I flounder in the goings-on, foolish prattle, and vain fuss.’

Paysage composé: a genius for landscape

In the latter part of Vallotton’s career, he turned his attention to painting still lifes, nudes and, perhaps most memorably, landscapes. An eerie mood, a hard light and an utter stillness tend to characterise the landscapes, all derived from an approach that the artist called paysage composé. This involved making a sketch on the spot outdoors, which served as a departure point for a painting created back in his studio.

As Vallotton put it in 1916, ‘I dream of a painting free from any literal respect for nature. I’d like to be able to recreate landscapes only with the help of the emotion they have provoked in me.’

Paysage à Marcillac depicts the Célé River in southwestern France, as it curls its way through the eponymous hilly area of Marcillac. Tall poplar trees and other vegetation line its banks, captured in a rich variety of greens.

In an ingenious feat of foreshortening, the mauve section at the top of the picture isn’t a fog-filled sky, as it might initially seem, but actually a representation of cliffs that line the Célé. Spatial depth is compressed, the horizon blocked. The poplars are all slender and stand a certain distance apart from each other, perhaps an expression of the artist’s solitariness.

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Painted in 1925, the year he died aged 60, Paysage à Marcillac proves that Vallotton maintained his artistic powers to the end. His best paintings, in whatever genre, create a slight sense of unease, and anticipated the work of the American artist Edward Hopper.

Not for nothing did the curators of a major Vallotton exhibition at London’s Royal Academy and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019-20 call it Felix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet.

Works by Félix Vallotton from the Sam Josefowitz Collection will be on view at Christie’s in Zurich from 20 to 23 September 2023. Explore The Sam Josefowitz Collection from October to December at Christie’s in London and Paris