The Swirling Claustrophopias Of Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet

at Met Fifth Avenue, NYC
Reviewed by Lisa Zeiger

“…the deepest and earliest secret of all: that just as we watch other life, other life watches us.”
— Toni Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Fiction”

The superlative Félix Vallotton exhibition recently at the Metropolitan Museum, titled Painter of Disquiet, was an enthralling view of the tension between Vallotton’s early anarchist political engagement and the abiding, rather staid (though always darkling) character of his oeuvre over his 44-year career.

The evolution and seesaws of Vallotton’s style in print and paint reflect this opposition: the riotous, undulant lines and engulfing black planes of Vallotton’s woodcuts versus the static, stolid scenarios depicted in his paintings, in which deep jewel colors — often a rich Roman red — create interiors of subdued luxury, a plain yet sumptuous world of private bourgeois lives played out in rooms. His close friend, Edouard Vuillard, once said, “I don’t paint portraits, I paint people in their homes,” and the same impulse towards fusing the model and the intimate environment rules Vallotton. Both painters are apostles of the spaces which enclose and seem to clothe their inhabitants, particularly women, who in the age of Art Nouveau were depicted as the ultimate animators and ornament.