Through the Eyes of Félix Vallotton

An exhibition devoted to one artist can be very satisfying: not only do you get to know them and what made them tick, how they developed and changed, but often you also have a history lesson. And all the pictures too. We've been to just such a solo show in Switzerland, and just like Swiss trains, it all worked beautifully. The artist: Félix Vallotton. 

Vallotton Forever: The Retrospective at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, the city of his birth in 1865, is the culmination of a year of Swiss events to mark the 100th anniversary of his death in 1925. It's an absolutely massive show, bringing together about 250 works from public and private collections. But Vallotton's output was so varied, exploring so many different artistic avenues, that it's a constant voyage of discovery. 

So where to start? Perhaps in the mid-1890s, when Vallotton, who'd moved to the bright lights of Paris when he was just 16, joined the Nabis, the group of Post-Impressionists around Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis whose painting was characterised by flat expanses of colour. 

Among the subjects that fascinated Vallotton were assemblies of people and fashion, and you get both of those in this street scene, entitled En promenade. Two very fashionably dressed women in conversation and an older couple -- the man in a shiny top hat -- create a multi-coloured solid bloc on the left of the picture; on the right, it's just pavement, wall and closed shutters -- a very reduced palette. Connecting the two, pulling the scene towards the right, is the little girl breaking away from the adults, her hand and foot heading for the open space. We loved this painting. 

But that's about half-way round the 12 rooms of this show. Let's go back to the beginning (where the first picture, rather disconcertingly, is a study of a woman's bottom) and meet the artist himself, aged 20, looking very serious and straight at you. His eyes don't just follow you, they seem to size you up. Vallotton was a keen observer of details, as you discover on your tour. 

And particularly so in the wood engravings and drawings that made his name early in the 1890s. Full of subtle humour, they're illustrations of incidents on the streets of Paris. Crowds assemble, for processions, spectacles, outside shops and theatres, to watch criminals being arrested or holes being dug in the road. A series entitled Paris Intense packed more than 200 figures into just half a dozen images. Vallotton's growing success led to a book of 30 drawings on the same theme for collectors: Les Rassemblements -- gatherings, perhaps. 

Below another crowd is forming outside what appears to be an apartment building, the entrance guarded by a couple of policemen. A small child inside peers round the wall by the concierge's lodge. What's that on the ground in the hallway? A bomb! At least, that's what the title says. 

Your eye is caught by the moustache of the gendarme on the right, the baker's boy with his basket, the ginger-haired lad at the front in a checked smock. Oh, and the dog, of course. There always seems to be a dog in Vallotton's crowd scenes. And then there's the patterns: the weave of the bread basket, the bricks forming the concierge's office, the wiggly lines in the bigger blocks and the dramatic matching diamond shapes on the door behind the policeman.

In the late 1890s, Vallotton heightened the effect of these graphic works with wood engravings that feature large unbroken expanses of black. One particularly striking example is La Symphonie, with the Nabi artists listening to their muse, Misia Natanson, playing the piano, the skirt of her white dress cut in two by the black piano leg. The culmination of these efforts was the series of 10 engravings entitled Intimités (Intimacies), scenes from the often unhappy love lives of the bourgeoisie. 

This is Money, and she doesn't look happy about the development. Other plates in the series include The Lie and The Triumph. 

Prints with large flat areas of black and white.... hang on, wasn't the Englishman William Nicholson, who we've just seen at the Pallant in Chichester, doing that in the 1890s as well? "The wood-engraving of M. Vallotton did not come to the notice of the English and American public until some time after that of Mr. Nicholson," reads a footnote in a bound copy of The Century magazine that's on show in Lausanne. "As a matter of fact, M. Vallotton's had precedence." 

Vallotton also translated these acerbic scenes of relationships into paint.  

In Le provincial (The Man from the Provinces, perhaps), there's no doubt who holds all the cards in this pairing. The woman's black hat and dress seem to form a set of jaws ready to consume their prey, and the imbalance is emphasised by the size of those glasses.

As at the last Vallotton show we saw, at London's Royal Academy in 2019, we're not allowed to bring you a picture of the stunning triptych Le Bon Marché, showing the crowded and fashionable Paris department store. In the centre panel, shoppers stream down the grand staircase, as if they were worshippers processing up the aisle of a cathedral. Bargains are to be had on both wings, too, and while the owners of the painting don't want you to photograph it, they obviously don't mind licensing the right-hand panel with the woman in the fabulously patterned red-and-black jacket for a book cover (Zola's novel The Ladies' Delight was inspired by the same store). 

A bit more fashion? Oh go on.... Let's dress up to go to the beach before we head upstairs to the second floor to see what Vallotton did next.

And the answer is, to a large extent, nudes and landscapes, which formed a sizeable part of his output after the start of the 20th century. There are a lot of nudes, perhaps too many; if there was one section of this show that could have been trimmed, this was it. Vallotton's most famous may be La Blanche et la Noire, an updated take on Manet's Olympia that features a sleeping naked white woman and a clothed black woman who's sitting on the bed looking at her while smoking a cigarette. They're lovers, the wall caption states without any sourcing. Maybe there's a bit too much modern overinterpretation going on here. Also on show is The Turkish Bath, with a dachshund joining the ladies.  

Vallotton was Swiss, but he became a French citizen as well in 1900. When he tried to sign up for the French army on the outbreak of World War I, he was turned down because he was approaching 50. He was plunged into depression. In this 1914 self-portrait in his dressing gown, he looks a bitter man, older than his years. This was apparently the first time he'd portrayed himself with a palette and brushes; the red, white and blue of the French tricolour can just be glimpsed as paints on the top edge of the palette. 

How to paint the horrors of the war? His still life of red peppers from 1915 has one of the peppers reflected in a knife, making it look like it's stained with blood.

Later, Vallotton travelled to the front as a war artist. His 1917 painting Verdun presents an abstracted image of conflict: Cloud, smoke, fire, rays of light, rain, destruction all come together in a landscape of chaos. 

But landscapes of beauty are what we end with. Often surprising canvases with simplified lines, composed as a synthesis of motifs, rather than reflecting any precise reality of countryside; shorelines, rivers, hills. In Le rayon, a shaft of sunlight breaks through into an avenue of trees; in a pond at Honfleur in Normandy, the duckweed creates a spectre-like shape in the water. Let's stay near Honfleur for our last picture, the beach at Vasouy, where Vallotton's eye takes us from the grass-topped cliff on the left across the sand with its groynes to the waters of the English Channel. Just two small figures provide a human presence.

Vallotton was a very prolific artist, and while this is a huge exhibition including a short film, it's by no means exhaustive. One painting we did miss was The Ball from the Musée d'Orsay, with its unusual perspective. But there's always more to see with Vallotton and we look forward to our next meeting. As for this show, it's probably the best we've seen all year, in a fantastic exhibition space. If we gave marks, it would be 10 out of 10. 

Practicalities

Vallotton Forever: The Retrospective is on at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne until February 15. The museum is normally open from 1000 to 1800 from Tuesday to Sunday, with lates on Thursday until 2000. It's closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Standard admission is 15 Swiss francs, about £14 (Given how expensive most things are in Switzerland, that's ludicrously good value, cheaper for example than the very small Joseph Wright of Derby show at the National Gallery in London). We spent a good three hours in the exhibition, so don't arrive too late in the day. There's an exhibition guide in English giving a translation of the main wall texts introducing each of the 12 rooms, but note that any captions for individual paintings and graphic works are only in French. 

The MCBA couldn't be more conveniently located, right next to Lausanne's main railway station. You can see the tracks (not to mention Lake Geneva and the Alps) as you climb the main staircase. 

Images 

Félix Vallotton (1865-1925), En promenade, c. 1895, Private collection. Photo: Peter Schälchli, Zurich
Félix Vallotton, Self-Portrait at the Age of 20, 1885, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne. Photo: MCBA, Lausanne
Félix Vallotton, La bombe from Les Rassemblements, 1895/1902-03, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne
Félix Vallotton, L’argent, 1898, from the Intimités (Intimacies) series, 1897-98, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne. Photo: MCBA, Lausanne
Félix Vallotton, Le provincial, 1909, Pauline Art Foundation. Photo: All rights reserved 
Félix Vallotton, Sur la plage, 1899, Private collection
Félix Vallotton, Autoportrait à la robe de chambre, 1914, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne
Félix Vallotton, Poivrons rouges, 1915, Kunstmuseum Solothurn. © 2025, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Photo: Kunstmuseum Solothurn
Félix Vallotton, La grève blanche, Vasouy, 1913, Private collection