Nathalia Brodskaïa
Félix Vallotton
The Nabi from Switzerland
Félix Vallotton
The Nabi from Switzerland
Author:
Nathalia Brodskaïa
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ISBN: 978-1-78310-178-8
Nathalia Brodskaïa
Félix Vallotton
The Nabi from Switzerland
Content
Introduction
A Talented Artist
His Training
The First Successes
His Paintings
The Nabis and Engraving
Encountering the Nabis
Engraving
The Turning Point of Vallotton’s Career
The Return to Painting
His Last Years
Vallotton’s Women
Engravings
Bibliography
Index
Portrait of the Artist’s Brother with Hat, 1888.
Oil on canvas, 76 x 61 cm.
Private collection, Galerie Vallotton, Lausanne.
That very strange Vallotton – that was how Thadée Natanson, the publisher of La Revue blanche magazine, referred to the friend of his youth. In fact, Félix Vallotton did not bare his soul immediately, even to close friends. In the artistic milieu of Paris to which they both belonged, there were no ordinary people, but even among them, Vallotton stood out as being a most unusual individual. The reasons lay not so much in his character, which was indeed full of surprises, but in the phenomenon of his creative biography. Having fallen in love with painting, Vallotton suddenly abandoned it and became the greatest European engraver of the turn of the century.
Having devoted a total of only eight years to printmaking, he mastered that most forgotten of all the graphic arts – xylography. Despite his culture and intellectualism, and his membership of the group of Symbolists, Vallotton’s works were easily understood, even by the man-in-the-street. In painting, he earned fame as a conservative and a Neo-Classicist, while contriving to keep up with both the latest trends and the most progressive understanding of colour.
Although he never had any intention of shocking the public, the artist nevertheless was given much attention in the press from the moment his creations made their first appearances at exhibitions in Paris. Vallotton’s œuvre has not been overlooked by any of the most important critics and art historians. Claude Roger-Marx, Arsène Alexandre, Camille Mauclair, Félix Fénéon, and Gustave Geffroy wrote about his early works. As early as 1898, Julius Meier-Graefe had published a monograph on Vallotton the engraver, whereas his monograph on Renoir did not appear until 1912. He did not escape the attention of the authors of La Revue blanche, or of the Swiss critics for that matter. Louis Vauxcelles and Guillaume Apollinaire wrote about the artist at the beginning of the 20th century, even in far-away Russia (where there were already magnificent art collections of the Impressionists, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh by the beginning of the 20th century), an individual treatise on Vallotton the engraver was published by N. Shchekatikhin as early as 1918.
Vallotton’s legacy has not been forgotten even now in the 21st century. He has been recalled by Francis Jourdain, Pierre Courthion, and André Salmon, has been afforded an important place in 20th-century fine art by Charles Chassé, Gotthard Jedlicka, Florent Fels, and Élie Faure. Vallotton’s works have been exhibited in many countries, and he has been the subject of various monographs, including a work by Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler, a Swiss collector of Vallotton’s paintings. A catalogue of engravings and lithographs was compiled by a nephew of the artist, Maxime Vallotton, and the art critic, Charles Goerg. Three volumes of documents “on the biography and history of the work” published by Gilbert Guisan and Doris Jakubec have made it possible to examine the life and œuvre of “that very strange Vallotton” properly. The details of the artist’s hard life, contacts with friends, intimate relationships, the creative process, and his dealings with his patrons are assembled, fragment by fragment, in excerpts from his letters and diary and in painstaking commentaries. While acknowledging gratitude for that work, we offer yet another essay on the artist, in the hope that it will help the reader penetrate the world of his art in some measure.
The Visit or The Top Hat, Interior, 1887.
Oil on canvas, 33.5 x 24.5 cm.
Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre.
Portrait of Young Delisle, 1890.
Oil on canvas, 46 x 33 cm.
Private collection.
This is the story of Félix Vallotton, who was born in the pretty town of Lausanne, on the shores of Lake Geneva, and who became famous as an engraver and artist in Paris, lived sixty years to the day, and maintained his Swiss identity throughout.
As your train emerges from the tunnel, the blue lake, as lovely as the sea, unfolds to your view. From the swathe of mist between the water and the sky, the snow-covered mountains emerge. The nearby bank is patch-worked with the irregular rectangles of the vineyards, which soon give way to the houses of Lausanne running up the slope. It is difficult to imagine anywhere on earth that is prettier than Lake Geneva. In the 18th century, this area was visited by the Russian historian and writer, Nikolay Karamzin, who dedicated these words to Lake Geneva:
“Whether I shall see you again in my lifetime, I do not know; but if fire-breathing volcanoes do not turn your beauty into dust – if the ground does not open up before you, dry up this sparkling lake and swallow its shores – you will always be a source of wonder for the mortals!”
In the mid-19th century, the young Lev Tolstoy wrote on the banks of Lake Geneva:
“Its beauty blinded me, and immediately struck me with the force of the unexpected. In that very instant I wanted to love…, life became a joy to me, and I wanted to live forever and ever…”
Nevertheless, for anyone who was born there, the bewitching beauty of this area sometimes acquired a fateful tinge. The Lausanne writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz told of the deceptive nature of the mountains and the constant need for vigilance in man, who was so insignificant in their stern world. The titles of his novels speak for themselves: Great Fear in the Mountains and If the Sun Never Rose. The sensation of diffidence, as well as the insignificance of man’s efforts in his struggle against the great and fearless elements, leads not only to melancholy, but also to depression and despair. Jean-Pierre Schlunegger, the delicate and sensitive poet from Vevey, committed suicide by hurling himself from the elegantly curved arch of a bridge among the cliffs surrounding the lake. There is something in the nature of this area that gives birth to characters that are strange and tragic, closed and resistant to any attempt at comprehension.
“Between a country and its people there is kinship,” said the Romanticist writer Juste Olivier, who dedicated his two-volume work The Canton of Vaud (1837-1841) to his country. No-one has gained a better understanding of the intricacies of a life which has moulded “a generation of ploughmen, herdsmen, and vine-growers” than he has. Olivier continued:
Felix Jasinski in his Printmaking Studio, 1887.
Oil on canvas.
Private collection.
“Our life is not noisy and not dazzling, but even if there is nothing ostentatious in it, there is also no deception or false modesty about it: it possesses sincerity and truth; strength, boldness, patience, truthfulness, a feeling of our own dignity and individuality, a strange aversion to affectation and excessively free gestures, a democratic and natural instinct, simplicity, very true sound and really natural colour; it contains nothing forced, and in the final analysis it possesses a special, if almost imperceptible originality, the basic feature of which could not be erased by civilisation – that is our quiet independence.”
And not one man of words, music, or art whose fate is connected to Lake Geneva has been able to escape the influence of the nature of the country and its way of life, to a greater or lesser extent. It was here, on the shores of the Geneva, that the artist Félix Vallotton was born on 28 December 1865.
July 14, Etretat, 1889.
Oil on cardboard, 47 x 60 cm.
Private collection.
Les Charbonnières, 1889.
Oil on canvas 24.5 x 32.5 cm.
Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne.
View of Zermatt, 1889.
Oil on canvas, 73 x 105 cm.
Private collection, Switzerland.
Young Girl Painting, 1892.
Oil on canvas, mounted on wood,
32.5 x 41 cm.
Josefowitz Collection, Lausanne.
The Vallotton ancestors came from the little town of Vallorbe in the canton of Vaud. The artist’s father, Adrien Vallotton, owned a chandlery and grocery shop in Lausanne, and later a small chocolate factory. The family lived on the narrow town hall square, the Place de la Pelouse (Meadow). The name of the square, just like the well-preserved ornamental pool here, is reminiscent of the age-old occupation – cattle farming – of the local residents, who built the reservoirs as watering-places for their cattle. In the centre of the pool there is an ancient painted stone sculpture representing justice. A steep flight of steps runs from the square up to the Notre Dame cathedral. It was here, in the very centre of Lausanne, that the future artist was born, and spent his childhood and youth; and the view of the blue lake from the square beside the cathedral remained in his memory forever, and found its way into his art.
Maxime Vallotton, the artist’s nephew, recounted that Félix was a delicate and sensitive child. The Franco-Prussian War and the smallpox epidemic, from which so many people suffered, including his father, made an enormous impression on him. In 1875, the boy was sent to a high school where the teachers inevitably noticed his aptitude for literature and drawing. The story is still told in the family of how, one day, during a boring lesson, Félix drew a portrait of his teacher. Astounded by the likeness, the teacher not only refrained from punishing him, but even kept the drawing for himself.
When attending evening classes in drawing, Félix fell into the hands of an attentive mentor – the artist, Jean Samson Guignard. After completing his studies in Lausanne, Vallotton persuaded his father to allow him to study painting in Paris, and they both went there in 1882. After booking in to the Hotel de Russie, they had a look round the city in which Félix would spend the rest of his life. The Académie Julian was in the suburb of Saint-Denis. It was an art school founded by Rodolphe Julian, a former artist’s model, with a teaching staff which included the most famous professors in Paris who regularly won all the top artistic prizes. Adrien Vallotton left his son at the Académie Julian to master the rudiments of the craft, under the guidance of Jules Lefebvre, Gustave Boulanger, and Guillaume Bouguereau. Although Félix had passed the examinations for l’École des Beaux-Arts at the same time, Vallotton preferred the Académie Julian, as its classical system accorded with his ideas of real art and its adherence to naturalism with tastes developed under the influence of paintings by Vaudois artists. His life acquired a monotonous and exhausting rhythm. In a letter to his brother soon after his arrival in Paris:
The Seamstress, 1891.
Oil on canvas, 32 x 40 cm.
Private collection, Lausanne.
The Patient, 1892.
Oil on canvas, 74 x 100 cm.
Josefowitz Collection, Lausanne.
The Bistro, c. 1895.
Oil on canvas, 22 x 27 cm.
Private collection.
“So far I have not seen much apart from some museums. The botanical gardens, which did not make much impression on me, one or two theatres which I visited with father, the Panthéon, which is magnificent and which affords a marvellous view on a fine day. Every day, I follow the very same route and see the very same things: the Louvre, which I cut through, the Magasins du Louvre, the Place des Victoires and the Bourse … The professor is pleased with me, but I am not pleased with myself, and sometimes feel sad … My heart sinks when I think of what I am about to study, and realise that I am nothing compared with the great artists who startled the world at the age of fifteen…”
Fellow students respected Vallotton for his seriousness and restraint; his professors considered him a model student and dreamt of his winning the Prix de Rome. In 1884, when Adrien Vallotton asked Lefebvre what he thought of his son’s abilities, the professor replied:
Lausanne Gazette