Félix Vallotton

Felix Vallotton (1865-1925), born in Lausanne (Switzerland), went to Paris in 1882 to study at the Academie Julian among the founders of the Nabis group and made the French metropolis his home for the rest of his life. During his membership of the Nabis 1892-1901 he mainly worked as a printmaker, developing a very distinctive style in woodcutting. After breaking with the Nabis in 1901, Vallotton turned more to painting, soon to become a major figure of French post-impressionism and the most important Swiss symbolist artist. He also wrote plays and a novel. His naturalism, with an eerie note at times, is close to a literary one and the symbolist language of his pictures puts him close to psychoanalyis. This book presents Vallotton from today s point of view not just as a symbolist painter and printmaker of great accomplishment at the beginning of the modern age, but also as an intelligent observer of his time who exposed bourgoise conventions critically and ironically.