Félix Vallotton: The sharp eye of the Nabis

The text below is the excerpt of the book Félix Vallotton (ISBN: 9781783101788), written by Nathalia Brodskaïa, published by Parkstone International.

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-thestreet. 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 oeuvre 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 faraway 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 oeuvre 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.

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 firebreathing 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. Noone 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:

“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.

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