Vallotton: Overlooked and Underappreciated

Switzerland, Orson Welles's character Harry Lime opined in The Third Man, had enjoyed 500 years of democracy and peace, yet its greatest contribution to culture was the cuckoo clock. Maybe Harry, like a lot of people, had just never heard of Félix Vallotton.

The Swiss-turned-French artist has never been the subject of a full exhibition in Britain before, but that's all put right now at the Royal Academy in London with Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet, with lots of loans from museums in France and Switzerland to introduce you to his often surprising work.

We've actually come across pictures by Vallotton in several shows on both sides of the Channel in recent months, so we felt sure we'd enjoy this exhibition. We weren't, though, expecting to find it such a smash hit from start to finish.

Vallotton, who was born in Lausanne in 1865 and who moved to Paris at the age of 16, is not an easy artist to classify. He had a spell as one of the avant-garde Nabis group alongside Vuillard and Bonnard, but started out painting in a very classically precise realistic style. His work in later years has affinities with the German New Objectivity movement, and that's where we're going to start; one of the most striking paintings in this exhibition dates from 1913 and it's called The White Woman and the Black Woman.

Fifty years earlier, Edouard Manet had shocked the world with Olympia, depicting a provocatively naked white courtesan and a clothed black servant. Painter of disquiet: This would certainly have been a disquieting image on the eve of World War I. The relaxed, self-assured pose of the black woman, puffing a cigarette, as she stares at the slumbering naked white form. And what about those colours -- turquoise and orange....

Even in his early, very realistically painted pictures, with their flavour of the Dutch Golden Age, there's a degree of subversion in Vallotton. In The Sick Girl, the focus isn't on the invalid in the bed, who's got her back to you, it's on the maid bringing in the drink, who's looking at you, not the patient, and somehow recalling The Chocolate Girl by Jean-Etienne Liotard (another great Swiss painter Harry Lime ignored).

But shortly after he painted The Sick Girl, Vallotton got a lot more experimental, joining the Nabis in their attempt to convey emotion through bold flat blocks of colour. The Waltz depicts a whirl of ice-skating couples gliding across a surface that shimmers in artificial light. 

Vallotton's shift in style in this period is perhaps most notably illustrated by Bathing on a Summer Evening. A poolful of far-from-idealised bathers, a long way from the norms of western painting, in a picture that owes much to the Japanese prints that so impressed the Nabis and other late 19th-century artists. Toulouse-Lautrec was one of the few to appreciate it when it was shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1893, but even he thought the police might turn up and take it away. 

A few years later, Vallotton produced a very Nabi-like piece of decoration in the form of a triptych showing The Bon Marché Department Store in Paris. There's an incredible bustle of customers and staff, and wonderful colours and forms in the pastel fabric that winds round the central staircase. Shopping as the new religion? This absolutely terrific work is now in a Swiss private collection, and, alas, not to be photographed, so you'll need to get down to the RA to appreciate it, side panels and all.  

Much of Vallotton's finest work in the 1890s came in the form of woodcuts. The greatest series of these is a set of 10 called Intimacies, satirising the marital and extramarital relations of the bourgeoisie. Vallotton's prints are striking for their large expanses of white and black, with the protagonists seeming partially to blend into the background. 

The artist pursued the same theme in a number of paintings, such as The Red Room, in which a couple appear to be engaged in some test of will in a doorway at the back of a claustrophobic interior. It's like a scene from a psychological drama by Ibsen or Strindberg.

Vallotton married into wealth in 1899 and his new financial security meant he could give up the day job of woodcuts and concentrate on painting. One of his best-known works was painted in that year: The Ball. A small girl is seen from an upstairs window playing in a garden on a summer's day, a blur chasing a red ball. But there's a strange atmosphere of menace as the shadows of tall trees fall across the picture from the left and more greenery looms up on the right. Two women in the background seem a very long way away.

And what on earth's going on here, as a woman searches through this well-stocked linen cupboard in the middle of the night? What can have gone missing? Is there a grubby little secret to be discovered in the midst of all those pristine white sheets? Quite a Swiss image, we felt....

Vallotton may have been financially comfortably off in his new life, but his new family circumstances may not have been quite so comfortable. In Dinner by Lamplight, the painter looms over the table, with his stepdaughter small and vulnerable as she sits opposite him, as if she were being interrogated under a bright light. 

Painter of disquiet? Very much so. There often seems to be a story we're eavesdropping on, one whose details we can't quite get to the bottom of. All does not seem to be straightforward in this minimalist view of The Theatre Box, with the identity of the woman at the front obscured by the shade of her large hat and the man behind, his mouth not visible to us, as we look up from below. 

There's one final room in this show devoted to still-life and landscape painting, and these are genres that also display Vallotton's realism with a tinge of unease. Red Peppers, painted in 1915, a year into World War I, is at first glance a study of shiny, if somewhat gnarled, vegetables on a table. But there's a knife on the table too, reflecting one of the peppers that makes it seem as if it's stained with blood....

There was scarcely a work in this fascinating show of 80 or so exhibits that didn't appeal to us in one way or another. It's one of the best exhibitions we've seen at the Royal Academy, and among this year's most exciting shows. 

And for our American readers, there's a chance to see Vallotton for yourselves when this exhibition moves on to the Metropolitan Museum in New York from October 29 to January 26.

Practicalities

Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet runs until September 29 at the Royal Academy on Piccadilly in central London. It's open daily from 1000 to 1800, with lates on Fridays until 2200. Full-price tickets are £16, or £14 without a Gift Aid donation. Online booking is available here. The RA is a few minutes' walk from Green Park and Piccadilly Circus Tube stations.

Images

Félix Vallotton, The White Woman and the Black Woman (La Blanche et la Noire), 1913, Kunstmuseum Bern, Hahnloser/Jaeggli Foundation, Villa Flora, Winterthur
Félix Vallotton, The Sick Girl (La Malade), 1892, Kunsthaus Zürich
Félix Vallotton, The Waltz (La Valse), 1893, Musée d'art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre
Félix Vallotton, Bathing on a Summer Evening (Le Bain au soir d'été), 1892-93, Kunsthaus Zürich. © Kunsthaus Zürich
Félix Vallotton, Extreme Measure (Le Grand Moyen) from Intimacies (Les Intimités), Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva
Félix Vallotton, Woman Searching through a Cupboard (Femme fouillant dans un placard), 1901, Private collection, Switzerland
Félix Vallotton, Dinner by Lamplight (Le Dîner, effet de lampe), 1899, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Félix Vallotton, The Theatre Box (Le Loge de théâtre, le monsieur et la dame), 1909, Private collection
Félix Vallotton, Red Peppers (Poivrons rouges), 1915, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Dübi-Müller Foundation. Photo: © SIK-ISEA, Zürich