It is essential to know that he was born in Lausanne of Swiss Protestant parents. Yet throughout that wide range - the nudes, the interiors, the cityscapes, the townscapes, the classicizing landscapes, the nightmare scenes of shattered French townships during World War I, the battle scenes around Verdun in 1917, the glimpse of Zeppelin raids on Paris and the hefty still lifes of the early 1920's - an irreducible self is somehow present.Īnd who was Felix Vallotton, anyway, to have so large a claim upon our attention? A good question. It falls into several discrete sections, and there are times when Vallotton seems to be trying a new idiom, a new personality and a new range of subject matter. A nervous breakdown in first youth may not have helped, either.īut this exhibition has great rewards to offer, and great provocations, too. He had trouble getting rid of an ingrown Swiss awkwardness, and a high-collared, heavy-mustached, unsmiling air. Nor do his paintings radiate the delight in life that was the mark of the works of his friends Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. Vallotton was neither the easiest nor the most fluent of painters. In its totality, the show is as impressive as it is disconcerting.

Not only does it fill the entire first floor of the museum, but it has a redoubtable annex - an enormous room, decked out for the occasion with carpet, center table, flowers in plenty and wall upon wall of Vallotton's very large paintings of the female nude. It consists of more than 100 paintings (many of them large), 18 drawings and 33 prints.

Among American Museum debuts of recent date, both the most monumental and the longest delayed is the exhibition of paintings and prints by the Swiss-born Felix Vallotton (1865-1925) at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Vallotton le bon marché