Félix Vallotton

Félix Édouard Vallotton was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 28 December 1865 and moved to Paris as a teenager, eventually becoming a French citizen in 1900. He died in Paris on 28 December 1925, exactly sixty years after his birth. Working across painting and printmaking, he became one of the most distinctive figures associated with Les Nabis and with French modernism more broadly, forging a visual language defined by psychological tension, flattened planes, stark contrasts, and an unflinching scrutiny of bourgeois private life.

Vallotton's woodcuts secured his early reputation and remain central to his legacy. Works such as L'Annonciation (1892), La Charge (1893), La Manifestation (1893), and L'Assassinat (1893) demonstrated his capacity to compress dramatic social and political content into bold black-and-white forms, reviving the woodcut as a vehicle for modern expression. The ten-print cycle Intimités (1898) — including L'Argent — brought this approach to bear on the hidden transactions of domestic and erotic life, using silhouette and cropped interior space to expose what polite society preferred to leave unspoken. The Lie (1897), Interior with a Black Cat (1894), The Bath (1894), and Clair de lune (1895) further extended his graphic range, while Les Misères de la guerre (1916–17) turned his laconic visual economy toward the devastation of the First World War. His paintings pursued parallel concerns. Le Bain au soir d'été (1896), held at the Kunsthaus Zürich, exemplifies his Nabis-period synthesis of decorative flattening and cool emotional detachment. La Paresse (1896) and La Chambre rouge (1898), both at the Musée d'Orsay and the Kunstmuseum Winterthur respectively, show how his printmaker's instinct for stark surface and psychological ambiguity translated into oil. Later canvases such as The White and the Black (1913), Verdun (1917), War (1917), and the late still lifes and landscapes constructed from memory extended his reach into history painting, war imagery, and meditative abstraction.

Vallotton exhibited widely during his lifetime, showing with Ambroise Vollard in the 1897 Nabis exposition, at Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune in Paris around the turn of the century, and at the landmark Armory Show in New York in 1913. His work entered major institutional collections during his lifetime and has continued to do so: the Musée d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Tate Modern, the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne all hold significant holdings. The Fondation Félix Vallotton in Lausanne serves as the primary centre for documentation and research on his work. Posthumous exhibition activity has been sustained and international in scope, encompassing solo presentations at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum in Tokyo, and the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, as well as a centenary exhibition at Kunst Museum Winterthur in 2025. Michael Werner Gallery in New York has maintained an ongoing commitment to his work in the primary market. A century after his death, Vallotton's reputation as a painter of disquiet — precise, unsentimental, and quietly radical — continues to attract sustained critical and scholarly attention.