“Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet”

An artist who played a role in the transition from Impressionism to abstract art, Félix Vallotton isn’t as well known as contemporaries such as Van Gogh, Cézanne and Seurat. Hailing from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, Valloton was a founding member of Les Nabis, a collection of young Parisian artists who were the first to espouse the idea that a painting was first and foremost “a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order,” as another member, Maurice Denis, wrote in 1890. Vallotton’s own work—landscapes, portraits, genre scenes—followed the flatness formula, especially in his stark, black and white woodcuts whose graphics remains surprisingly radical. Voloton’s most striking efforts, however, were his bourgeois interiors, in which domesticity plays out as a drama of existential unease.