The alliance changed Vallotton's fortunes dramatically, as he moved into more luxurious quarters and was soon exhibiting his works with Galerie Bernheim-Jeune.Īs the 19th century drew to a close and the 20th century began, and as he settled into the kind of bourgeois life he had once scorned, Vallotton took what seems to be a curiously independent artistic path.
Vallotton's success was fostered by his marriage in 1899 to Gertrude Rodrigues-Henriques, a wealthy widow with three children, who was the daughter of the art dealer Alexandre Bernheim. It sold for about $2.1 million in London in 2006.
His auction record is held by EN PROMENADE, an asymmetrical Nabi composition showing a bourgeois family taking a sidewalk constitutional, which was painted on a 12 x 18 in. He also illustrated magazines and books, and wrote exhibition reviews, plays and novels. To specialists he is also known, after a career that was ended by cancer at age 60, for interior scenes, "intimities" and pictures of couples in romantic embrace, large reclining nudes, Swiss landscapes and dramatic allegorical pictures. Vallotton came to Paris from Switzerland when he was 17 to study at the Académie Julian and soon achieved a certain level of popularity with his very modern, Japonisme-inspired black-and-white woodcuts, which could be starkly decorative (LES CYGNES, an image of swans courting among the reeds) or amusingly contemporary (LE BON MARCHÉ, an elaborate scene of women shoppers at a millinery sale).
Vallotton is justly celebrated for his friezelike portrait (not in the show) of the legendary anarchist and writer FÉLIX FÉNÉON EDITING LA REVUE BLANCHE (1896), the journal associated with the Nabi artists Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and ÿdouard Vuillard, an intense image of a man hunched over his manuscripts that today seems to presage the fervor of the solitary blogger. The ten studio portraits of women by Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) now on view at Michael Werner in New York are difficult pictures to like, and that is precisely where their mysterious appeal can be found.
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