![]() These could have been painted yesterday,” Newman says as she points to a gallery wall full of interiors populated with lovers in expensively furnished but stark, shadowy purgatories of their own making. Vallotton’s striking paintings and woodcut scenes of corrupt manners and morals don’t proclaim themselves as being specifically from turn-of-the-century Paris. Similarly, Vallotton cast his icy-cold eye on the manners and morals of the upper bourgeoisie in his paintings and woodcuts of well-furnished interiors, posh but dark, clandestine sites for assignations more furtive than passionate. They’re chilly, exotic products of what Newman calls some northern clime. The rubbery nudes seem displaced from some indeterminate time and place. Among these are wild, weird, strangely compelling, one-of-a-kind, strikingly dissonant and dreamlike. While “arid” is Newman’s overall adjective for the roomful of nudes, other words might well spring into a viewer’s head. “Vallotton takes the nude - a classical subject - and inverts it into something else so that you have this constant sense of unease, of disruption in these very interesting and very troubling pictures.” ![]() They take on these shapes with their puttylike skin. “All these women have these extraordinary, attenuated, dismembered bodies. And the whole thing about fetishism is that the woman’s body is turned into the phallic shape as a way of staving off fear of castration. “These pictures demand Freudian analysis. There’s always the sense of a kind of phallic fragmentation,” Newman says. “Look at this woman with her back to you. If Vallotton’s nude paintings are dispassionate, often ugly or even faceless, they are also “at all times fleshless, and at all times fetish,” Newman writes in the catalog. In the show’s scholarly but unpedantic catalog, which is the only major reference on Vallotton’s life and work in English, Newman notes that in his later paintings, “narrative and sexual elements are so rigidly controlled that the refusal of emotion is itself a position.” If there’s one word that best describes the underlying style for Vallotton’s nudes, that word would be “arid,” Newman says. “Vallotton can be a riveting painter, but he’s this really uptight, hard pressed Calvinist from Switzerland who, despite all the time he spent in Paris, never completely assimilated, at least not artistically,” she says. In the past two years, Newman has put together the first major exhibition in the United States for this impossible-to-pigeonhole artist’s paintings and woodcuts that won him acclaim in his lifetime, but failed to elevate him into the pantheon of early modern immortals. Newman, head of the department of European and contemporary art at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven. ![]() In fact he’s really nothing like that at all,” says Sasha N. “You have Pierre Bonnard, you have Edouard Vuillard and then there’s Felix Vallotton - and everybody assumes he’s just like them. ![]() With his disturbing portraits of female nudes, his slashing, satirical images of decadent sexual mores among the upper middle class and wry psychological studies of boisterous Paris street life near the turn of the century, the brilliant but enigmatic painter and graphic artist Felix Vallotton (1865-1925) carved a unique, fascinating niche for himself that falls outside art history’s conventional categories for the period.
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