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4/10/2007

Felix Vallotton

Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich

Lover’s trysts, revelations, adultery. The artist Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) was an intelligent observer of his age. Born in Lausanne, Vallotton began his studies in Paris in 1882 and soon moved in the circles around the artists’ group the Nabis; he also wrote plays and worked as an illustrator for avant-garde magazines. What he revealed was shameful and shameless; and the masquerade indulged in by the models who sat for his portraits is often disturbing. Vallotton set himself apart from his fellows with his ironic social criticism, making daring satirical references to contemporary events in his art and eschewing the trappings of the bourgeois ideal. His art was characterised by indiscretion, mordant sarcasm and, occasionally, macabre humour. The remarkable acuity, often more than some of his contemporaries could bear, earned Vallotton entry into the ranks of an international avant-garde at the dawn of modernism.

Many works contain the first signs of formal elements that were to take on a belated significance for such movements as Surrealism, Neue Sachlichkeit and Pittura Metafisica. It is their aura of artifice that makes his paintings stylistically confusing: still lifes with intense fields of colour, empty landscapes with glaring contrasts of light and dark, and unusually harsh portraits. In his large-format paintings on historical and mythological themes, Vallotton's gift for irony adds make-up and fashionable hairdos to the canonical figures. And then there are his nudes, in which women are shown in stylised surroundings without the artist’s making the least effort to prettify their bodies. Vallotton, who was a great admirer of Holbein, Dürer, Cranach and Ingres, often incorporated a degree of ambivalence into his compositions – sometimes they are distinctly bewildering – which explains the power of his cool and distant work to fascinate viewers to this day.

The 90 paintings shown by Kunsthaus Zürich offer entertainment, stimulation and excitement. Together with Linda Schädler, Museum Director Christoph Becker has been able to bring better and lesser known major works from international museums and private collections back to German-speaking Switzerland, where Vallotton’s exhibition history began. The entire spectrum of work by this bold and radical artist will be on show until 13 January 2008 – with the assistance of the Banca del Gottardo.

Kunsthaus Zurich
Heimplatz 1 - Zurich

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