Poivrons Rouges:The Eye of Felix Vallotton.

Poivrons rouges! Red peppers! Food. It's always food. I've quietened down my Facebook usage considerably of late (disappointed with algorithms, people leaving, and lack of response to posts more than any genuine worries about data mining) but one thing that I'm keeping with, for now, is my album of art snaps:- 'Taking a line for a walk. Journeys into the art of London' and following Saturday's visit to the Royal Academy to see the Felix Vallotton:Painter of Disquiet exhibition I posted four photos of four of my favourite paintings on show there.

The one that got all the chat was 1915's Red Peppers. Or, to give it its French name - all works were subtitled in Vallotton's chosen language - Poivrons rouges. It's no surprise. For whilst I'm not in any doubt of the drooling, gluttonous nature of my friends (and indeed 'friends'), Red Peppers is a remarkable painting. To my eyes, it's the missing link between Chardin and Cezanne and, to me, that's no small beer.

One friend said it looked like a photograph and then went on to say she was unhappy with the red on the knife. A debate ensued. Was the red on the knife a reflection of the pepper on its steel surface? Did it improve the painting? Did it make it worse? I thought it was a reflection, rather than juice from the pepper itself, and I thought that it made the painting. Not everyone agreed. Never in my life has a discussion about a painting of a piece of cutlery caused such heated debate.

The curators of Painter of Disquiet had a third explanation. Rather than reflection or actual pepper, could the red represent blood? Vallotton painted Red Peppers during World War I and was this his way of symbolically showing us that although his gaze may be focused on the interior and the still life, his mind was very much aware of what was going on elsewhere, events that were happening across France that were anything but still?

 

Red Peppers (1915)

The Coffee Service (1887)

We could argue the toss until the red peppers overripen and go soft and mushy but what's not up for debate is Vallotton's skill with a paintbrush or, and you only have to look at 1887's Coffee Service to see this, his masterful way of rendering reflections in steel surfaces. This unassuming painting is as if Vallotton has brought Giorgio Morandi's cups, spoons, and assorted kitchenware into sharper focus and is worthy of a place on the top table (yes, table) with Avigdor Arikha's simple yet exquisite Sam's Spoon.

But lovingly rendered representations of prosaic household goods is far from Vallotton's only gift to the art world. Despite being known as the 'very singular Vallotton' he's a thorny artist to pin down and at times, while passing through the small yet busy rooms of the RA's upper gallery, it's almost as if we're looking at paintings by completely different artists.

There's Vallotton the portraitist with an unflinching eye for detail, Vallotton the painter of nudes, and Vallotton the expressionist riffing on Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde. That Vallotton is very close to the Vallotton of fauvism, the one who seems more aligned with Andre Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck than Vilhelm Hammershoi or Johannes Vermeer, both of whom sprang to mind looking at some of Vallotton's earlier paintings. Towards the end of both his career and this show there are even nods towards both impressionism and abstraction.

It'd be unfair to accuse Felix Vallotton of being a weather vane that blew in the wind of popular taste and client demand but, at the same time, he was definitely not an artist, like for example Cezanne, set on a predetermined course towards an ultimate destination. There was no glittering castle on the horizon of Vallotton's Oz.

Self-portrait at the Age of Twenty (1885)

Juliette Lacour (1886)

For Vallotton, it was about the journey more than it was about the destination. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1865 he set off for Paris at the age of just sixteen. A city that would see anarchist bombings, assassinations, and all manner of political upheaval as the century neared its close.

While, at the same time, cementing its reputation as the undisputed arts capital of the world. Vallotton's early work combined sardonic woodcut vignettes lampooning bourgeois hypocrisy with Bonnard/Vuillard style riots of colour and then, in 1899, he married Gabrielle Rodriques-Henriques, a wealthy art dealer's daughter, and turned his back on his bohemian Left Bank lifestyle and allowed his output to take an altogether more singular path, finally earning his sobriquet.

At least that's the rough narrative. Vallotton seems to dip back and forwards in style as suits him and, as a relative beginner, to his work it was sometimes difficult to make chronological sense of his artistic development. It was never, however, difficult to admire his work. His early portraits were made after rejecting a place at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in favour of the informal, and more liberal, Academie Julian.

Yet the crystalline precision of these paintings suggest he was not entirely free from formality. The young confident, serious painter, still only twenty, stares intensely and dispassionately almost beyond the viewer. The background a nondescript inky darkness worthy of Rembrandt. Juliette Lacour, on the other hand, and accused by a friend of mine of having a 'bad hair day', looks downbeat and pensive. Her resigned demeanour echoed in the background of unforgiving smoke stacks and caliginous clouds.

In 1892's The Sick Girl, Vallotton showed he could turn his hand to tableaux as well as portraiture. A disinterested maid all but ignores the patient as she brings her refreshments and Vallotton, himself, has put as much passion into the chair, china, and bedside cabinet as he has the protagonists.

The Sick Girl (1892)

The Five Painters (1902-03)

Another ensemble piece, The Five Painters, shows Pierre Bonnard, Edouward Vuillard, and the lesser known Charles Cottet and Ker-Xavier Roussel with Vallotton, either aloof or somehow detached, looking over them from a slight distance. The group were known as the 'Nabis' (prophets) and due to Vallotton's Swiss birth he was 'the foreign Nabi'.

It wasn't just the circumstances of his birth that set him apart in real life. It was also his determination not to be stymied or hemmed in by the the Nabis doctrinaire diktats. The Nabis advocated an anti-natural approach to painting and felt art should be about emotion, not replication of the external world. Vallotton joined them in being inspired by the woodblock prints of Japanese artists like Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro and, like his fellow Nabis, went on to make use of flattened perspectives and simplified forms but, unlike his fellow Nabis, he strove very quickly to break from his self-imposed shackles and was soon experimenting with other techniques and styles.

Moonlight and The Waltz, both from the 1890s, are floaty and ethereal and definitely speak more of emotion than they are tethered in any form of reality. Bathing on a Summer Evening broke so far from any tradition of realism that the work was "incomprehensible to the public who saw it at the Salons des Independants" in 1893 and even Toulouse-Lautrec, who was one who did 'get' it, wondered if the police may come and remove it.

Moonlight (c.1895)

The Waltz (1893)

Bathing on a Summer Evening (1892-93)

Three Bathers (1894)

Street Scene in Paris (c.1897)

1897's Street Scene in Paris is said to be one of Vallotton's most emblematic of the Nabis aesthetic. Much of it reveals the unpainted cardboard surface, the figures are cropped in unorthodox fashion, and the whole thing appears as if painted from above therefore giving the figures a flat, and unrealistic, look. As it Vallotton were removed, detached from his subjects. An observer rather than a partaker in life's rich pagaentry.

But elsewhere, Vallotton seems to be jumping right in and looking his subjects straight in the eye. The Woman in a Purple Dress under the Lamp is believed to be Helene Chatenay, a young seamstress who Vallotton had a seven year relationship with before abandoning her in 1899 for Rodrigues-Henriques (for the money, it's insinuated). Chatenay is caught in a moment of deep thought, almost as solitary as one of Edward Hopper's characters. Perhaps she's aware that Vallotton will soon leave her.

Woman in a Purple Dress under the Lamp (1898)

Self-portrait (1897)

Laziness (1896)

Not long after his marriage to Rodrigues-Henriques, Vallotton was involved in another abandonment. This time it was woodcuts that were given up on. So that Vallotton could pursue what he considered his true vocation. Painting. 

His last series of woodcuts, shown at the World's Fair in Paris in 1900 showed firework displays, picnic lunches, and recreations of Algerian street scenes. Building up to this, Vallotton had formed a close association with the artistic and literary review La Revue blanche (founded by the Natanson brothers:- Alexandre, Alfred, and Thadee) which included contributions by such major names as Marcel Proust, Alfred Jarry, Stephane Mallarme, Claude Debussy, and Erik Satie.

Vallotton, in the big league now, painted portraits of some of the principal players like Misia Godebska, wife of Thadee Natanson while also, of course, popping in one of his own self-portraits just to remind readers that he wasn't a mere hack for hire but was a prime mover on the scene. Elsewhere his work took to satirising the sexual mores of the Parisian bourgeoisie and even, it seems to me, telling little stories of romantic intrigue, lust, anxiety, and despair with just the one painting.

Misia at Her Dressing Table (1898)

The Lie (1898)

Waiting (1899)

The man in a suit peering impatiently from behind his net curtain in 1899's Waiting is waiting for who exactly? Maybe the lady in the red dress in the previous year's The Lie is late home and who's that she's with? Why is their embrace both tender and awkward? The poses struck by the characters in Vallotton's mini-dramas are as forced as the over the top colour schemes but instead of rendering the work ludicrous it somehow brings it in to focus even more.

We recognise and feel these emotions even as we know deep down we're being played. These people are actors and Vallotton is the director of their actions and, thus, our emotions. Look closely at 1898's The Red Room and this becomes even more clear. Are the couple in the doorway in a passionate clinch? Or are they arguing? Could they be in that state of a relationship when they are, somehow, simultaneously doing both? The props scattered around the table all risk taking on the role of Chekhov's gun. Potential weapons, possible props, or, perhaps like the use of such a dark red hue, highly ambiguous symbolism?

Vallotton has even gone so far as to include himself in a portrait bust resting on the mantelpiece. It's both his way of signing the work and also of letting us know that this drama has been designed and directed by his red right hand. It's no surprise that other members of the Nabis had been involved with the avant-garde theatre companies that were the first to produce the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg in Paris.

The Red Room (1898)

Five O'Clock (1898)

Five o'clock was the time of the day when French men were known to visit their mistresses before returning to their families and the embrace captured in the painting of the same name is both rushed and lustful but lacking in passion. Vallotton was a great observer of these private, snatched, moments but he also turned his eye often towards more sedate domestic life and genteel scenes of lazy alfresco afternoons spent underneath parasols and in the gardens of the French capital.

When La Revue blanche closed and the Nabis split up in 1903, Vallotton, by dint of marrying upwards, was cushioned from any real financial concern and also, due to his breadth as an artist, was able to continue in much the same vein as he had been before. In fact with even less of a commercial imperative underpinning his work he was able to briefly rest on his laurels with self-satisfied images of his own smug domestic bliss before going on to employ a harder edged realism than had been seen before.

The Ball (1899)

On the Beach (1899)

The long shadows and silhouetted figures suggest all was not well in paradise. 'Disquiet' crept into these otherwise idealised scenes of Rodrigues-Henriques, now Mrs Vallotton. She would be portrayed performing ordinary domestic chores but often from strange angles as if Vallotton's restless soul was determined to create a narrative from his mundane, moneyed, and luxurious life.

The devil, it seems, was finding work for his idle hands to do and a sense of ennui permeates his work of this era. There is little easy about these scenes that should be so comforting. The Red Room, Etretat, is almost a masterclass in making boredom look interesting and luxury look frustrating. Mrs Vallotton seems lost in her needlework, the small child no doubt lost in their imagination, but what of the artist himself? Is he lost in his painting or is he just lost? Lost in the heat of it all?

Interior with Woman in Red (1903)

The Red Room, Etretat (1899)

Woman Searching through a Cupboard (1901)

The Visit by Lamplight (1899-1900)

Vallotton was a master of painting artificial light and, of course, night was the best time to do this but nothing in paintings like The Visit by Lamplight or Dinner by Lamplight suggest his mind was any more at ease during the evenings than it was during the seemingly endless days of lounging around on expensive furniture.

The rooms are claustrophobic, family faces start to resemble grotesque masks (some years before Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon), and Vallotton himself is often shown as a shadow. Banquo's ghost at the feast. Simultaneously there but not there.The plates are full, the decor is of the most exacting standard, yet it's hard to look at these paintings and draw the conclusion that this was a totally happy household.

Dinner by Lamplight (1899)

Gertrude Stein (1907)

If Vallotton beat Picasso to th ol' mask thing, Picasso bested him by two years when it came to painting  Gertrude Stein, the celebrated American writer and art collector who had moved to Paris to be near the action in 1903. Stein was apparently more impressed with Vallotton's painting technique than with the result. 

Vallotton, if we are to judge by the following section of the exhibition, wasn't too bothered. He had his eyes on other women. Naked women. Ones with no clothes on. From 1904 onwards, and this can't surely have anything to do with those unhappy looking family portraits, Felix Vallotton made the female nude his principal subject.

Taking Ingres as inspiration, Vallotton set about making a thorough inspection of the unclothed female form. They're not as lecherous as Gauguin's (and certainly not as problematically noncey) and they're not as misogynistic as those of Degas. For the most part they're honest and touching rather than fin de siecle grot but there's no doubting there's still a little bit of the Peeping Tom/through the keyhole voyeur about them.

Nude in the Red Room (1897)

Models Resting (1905)

Model Sitting on a Divan in the Studio (1904)

Nude Holding Her Gown (1904)

These women, caught in their boudoirs and their own private moments either dressing, undressing, or just lying around naked chatting like one does, are at least given personality. They're not just bodies to be gawped at and fantasised about. I'd say it's unlikely an artist would choose to make paintings like this today but I've seen the work of Lisa Yuskavage and, anyway, the naked human body is a fascinating subject. One we shouldn't be so prudish about. Like most artists of his time, however, it must be noted that boobs and bums crop up a lot more in Vallotton's paintings than do men's dicks. 

That's okay, Vallotton probably wasn't that into cock. It's not his fault that the art world at the time, and now for the most part, prefer work by heterosexual men of subjects that heterosexual men like to look at. At least Vallotton was 'brave' enough to include a woman of colour in one of his paintings. She even got to keep her kit on unlike her white, much more pink really, co-star. A response, we're told, to Manet's 1863 Olympia which depicted a similar scenario. In an attempt at positioning Vallotton as a more modern artist than it seems likely he actually was, the curators have persisted in a narrative that the black woman is relaxed, confident, and active while the white woman is disengaged and passive.

The White Woman and the Black Woman (1913)

Nude Seated in a Red Armchair (1897)

If Vallotton had intended for us to read his painting that way, good on him. But I'm not convinced. His paintings do, as I wrote earlier, tell stories but I don't think that's the one he's telling here. Chaste Suzanne, from 1922, borrows a story. That of Susanna and the Elders from the Old Testament. It's one that Artemisia Gentileschi painted in the early seventeenth century (and one that cropped up in the National Gallery's 2016 Beyond Caravaggio exhibition and some numpty new blogger had a crack at writing about) and tells the tale of a young and innocent woman becoming the victim of two lecherous older men.

Vallotton has, seemingly - and I do buy this one, turned the tables. Suzanne, now with a z (you cunt), is now a 'wily seductress' (ok, the language isn't as 'woke' as the idea) who has enthralled two balding men. They look to me dressed for the theatre and in 1909's marvellous theatre box we can see that the theatre is a subject Vallotton returned to time and again. 

When he wasn't creating his own theatrical sets in oil he was rendering those from the actual theatre. The Theatre Box, apart from the two heads popping over the parapet to view the action, could almost be an abstract expressionist work worthy of Rothko. It's divided into two large fields of pure colour. The yellow of the balcony and the inky blackness of the background. Art was developing in new directions and Vallotton, a man who had plenty of time on his hands and no great money worries, was following it.

Chaste Suzanne (1922)

The Theatre Box (1909)

Of course the greatest 'theatre' to be found at the time was on the killing fields of Europe and Vallotton, speaking from the comfortable position of one who would never have to fight in one, wrote in a 1917 essay, "War! The word is magnificent. The day I saw it appearing in big letters on the walls, I honestly believe I felt the strongest emotion in my life". 

There's much to admire in Vallotton the painter but Vallotton the man, in instances such as these, leaves you exasperated and disappointed. To his credit he did at least try to enlist but, at 49 years old, he must have been fairly certain he would have been refused. Instead, deeply patriotic about his French homeland, he went on a tour of the trenches in the Champagne region and, to depict this, even briefly returned to woodcut in a series titled This is War! (C'est la guerre!).

The portfolio was broken up into six prints (The Trench, The Orgy, Barbed Wire, In the Darkness, The Lookout, and The Civilians) and although they don't flinch in depicting the brutality of World War I (there are explosions and corpses sprawled over barbed wire) there's something almost prurient about them. It's as if the man who had become bored of his gilded home life, his aristocratic wife, and his lovely furniture got a primeval thrill out of war. He seemed to view it as a game, a football match where you pick your team and cheer them on no matter what, and he seemed to get far more excited about people having their limbs blown off than he did by the naked women he'd been painting in the build up to the war.

This is War! (1915-16)

This is War! (1915-16)

Apples (1919)

"A man's man" no doubt! What it says about his interior motivations and psychology I'm not sure but it seems a little concerning. What it did for his art, however, was completely reset it. He was reborn anew, an artist invigorated by the changing nature and landscape of the world. Not for him a Paul Nash style retreat into the forests and trees to seek solace from the killing. Instead, Vallotton now painted everything as if sharpened and bloodied by the possibility of imminent death. 

It's worth reminding ourselves that Paul Nash saw service and Felix Vallotton did not. Those who have never seen a war are quick to romanticise it and often foolish enough to bring on another.  Vallotton's apples, and indeed peppers, were as sanguine as they were succulent looking. In the nourishment they provided they represented life but in their colours they foretold the bloody deaths that had so excited the ageing painter.

His landscapes too were drenched in unreal colours, and here he picked up again the movement towards abstraction that had become apparent in his pre-war painting. He called these works 'paysages composes' (composed landscapes) and spoke passionately about dreaming of painting free from any respect for literal nature and full of pure emotion. He was, to all intents and purposes, returning to the Nabis school of thought and imagining where, if they had not broken up, they might have gone next.

In 1925, Felix Vallotton died of cancer and it was left to other, now much more famous, artists to pick up where his work left off. But so varied was his output, so many different directions did he branch out in, that his place in art history, judging by this exquisite and timely RA retrospective, has been unfairly marginalised. Look at the range in the last four landscape paintings, all by Vallotton and all painted within a period of just twelve years, and marvel at how one man seems to have created the work of four artists.

Boredom may have made him abandon a once loved partner, marry into money, fail to find comfort in domestic bliss, and celebrate the death and destruction of war. But boredom, and of course disquiet, made him a questing artist always looking through new eyes and pushing art forward in more than one direction at the same time. Be glad you were neither married to him nor had to fight a war on his behalf but be thankful that, nearly a century after his death, we still have his work. It's not very humdrum.

Sunset, Villerville (1917)

Last Rays (1911)

Sunset, Grey-blue High Sea (1911)

Sandbanks on the Loire (1923)