Switzerland has declared 2025 as "Vallotton Year," marking the centenary of the death of Félix Vallotton, one of the confederation's most celebrated painters. The artist died on December 29, 1925, at a hospital in Neuilly following surgery for cancer, just one day after his sixtieth birthday. Buried at Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, Vallotton left behind an impressive body of work comprising nearly 1,700 paintings, approximately 250 engravings, hundreds of printed illustrations, three novels, a dozen theatrical plays, about thirty critiques and texts on art, several sculptures, and numerous drawings.
Vallotton once wrote in his journal on August 13, 1919: "It seems to me that I paint for balanced people, but not devoid, however, deep inside, of a little unconfessed vice. I like this state which is also my own." This quote captures the essence of an artist whose work consistently explored the tension between surface respectability and hidden desires, themes that resonate powerfully in the current retrospective exhibition.
Although Vallotton moved to Paris at barely sixteen years old and was naturalized as a French citizen, he never renounced his Swiss nationality, remaining deeply attached to his roots. His work constantly drew upon his memories of Switzerland, sometimes discretely, sometimes critically. Unlike his contemporary Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), who became the father of Swiss modernism and a symbol of national identity, Vallotton maintained an outsider's perspective on his country of origin. While Hodler embodied the painter of collective soul, tragic grandeur, and eternal Switzerland, Vallotton represented troubled intimacy, social irony, and urban modernity.
Vallotton shared more in common with another compatriot born in Lausanne, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859-1923). Both left Switzerland to perfect their artistic training in Paris, where they settled permanently. Steinlen arrived in 1881, Vallotton in 1882, and both became emblematic figures of the avant-garde. They were drawn to the Montmartre quarter and the legendary Chat Noir cabaret, founded by Rodolphe Salis, where they met and befriended other artists including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Adolphe Willette, and Louis Anquetin.
Both artists were convinced anarchists or socialists who used their art to critique capitalist society, working-class poverty, and social inequalities. Steinlen and Vallotton supported Dreyfus and produced works denouncing the exploitation of popular classes, the army, and the Church. However, Vallotton gradually distanced himself from militantism toward a more introspective approach, while Steinlen remained anchored in realistic observation and social engagement.
The Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts (MCBA) in Lausanne, Vallotton's birthplace, houses the world's most important collection of his works. The museum has partnered with the Félix Vallotton Foundation to present "Vallotton Forever," the most significant retrospective dedicated to the artist since the Grand Palais exhibition in Paris in 2013. This exhibition serves as the highlight of Vallotton Year.
Curated by Catherine Lepdor, chief curator of MCBA, and Katia Poletti, director of the Félix Vallotton Foundation, the exhibition brings together more than 250 works from Swiss, French, German, and American public and private collections. The scenography, designed by Cécile Degos, who has experience with museum spaces including the Guggenheim Bilbao and London's Royal Academy, adopts a thematic rather than strictly chronological approach, allowing for a cross-sectional reading of the work.
The exhibition aims to be both a declaration and a reevaluation, not merely a biographical tribute but a perspective on the astonishing modernity of an artist long reduced to the brilliance of his engravings, where deep velvety blacks contrast sharply with the purity of whites. The installation skillfully plays with the tension between surface and depth, forcing visitors to revisit what they think they already know about Vallotton's work.
The journey is structured around nine main sections, organized by medium, recurring motifs, and pivotal periods in the artist's career. The entrance, marked by an ochre wall and a quote from the artist's notebooks - "I paint to understand" - immediately establishes the introspective posture that runs throughout his work. The first rooms, dedicated to the years 1880-1900, capture the excitement of youth when sixteen-year-old Vallotton arrived in Paris, immersed himself at the Julian Academy, and exhibited at the Salon in 1885.
His initial portraits, including the "Self-Portrait at Twenty" (1885), demonstrate an academic realism still marked by the influence of Jules Lefebvre, his teacher at the Julian Academy, but already fractured by contained expressivity in the gaze. These works show faces where academicism already cracks under a questioning look. Studio drawings and studies after antique models reveal the technical rigor that would underpin all subsequent production.
The woodcut engravings, particularly the scandalous "Intimités" series (1897-1898), present scenes of embracing couples viewed through keyholes, rendered in stark black and white that evokes cynicism rather than sensuality. As an anarchist sympathizer, Vallotton used these works to denounce social repression, gender tensions, and marital hypocrisies. These plates, displayed in complete series, resonate as visual pamphlets, reminiscent of his press drawings for "Le Cri de Paris," "L'Assiette au beurre," and "La Revue blanche" (1895-1902), where he sketched Dreyfusards and portly bourgeois with acidic humor.
The exhibition's second part, at the turn of the twentieth century, reveals an intimate revolution. The break with the Nabi group, completed in 1903, marks entry into the third section, "Return to Reality (1900-1910)." The artist abandoned the Nabis to return to figurative work that was more cutting and carnal. Female nudes emerged as an obsession during this period.
"The Models' Rest" (1905), a pivotal canvas, shows three nude women seen from behind or in three-quarters view. They occupy a closed space without illusionist perspective. The frontality of the bodies, neutrality of the background, and precision of contour evoke Ingres, but the absence of narration and monumentality of the figures establish critical distance. These bodies, painted in brilliant colors ranging from deep violets to earthy ochres, dialogue with Ingres or Manet, but Vallotton infuses them with queer modernity and gender subversion that still disturbs today.
A dedicated section explores landscapes, often neglected in previous readings. Vallotton conceived them as "compositions" rather than topographical surveys. The composed landscapes from 1909 onward are freed from literal respect for nature, featuring views of Honfleur or the Côte d'Azur where reality bends to an almost pre-Cubist geometry. Works like "Sunset in the Mist" (1911) and "The White Beach Vasouy" (1913) illustrate this approach.
The 1914 war marked another dark and introspective shift. Vallotton, naturalized French in 1900 but still Swiss at heart, refused the Legion of Honor in 1912 and enlisted as a war artist in 1917 in the trenches of Champagne and Argonne. The "War Landscapes (1917-1918)" section brings together for the first time the complete set of canvases created from these missions, including "Verdun, Interpreted War Painting" (1917). The absence of human figures, apparent serenity of skies, and geometry of craters establish mute criticism of the conflict's absurdity.
The final rooms, "Late Intimacies (1919-1925)," explore the return to domestic subjects. Vallotton, consumed by illness, painted with increasingly marked economy. "The Red Room" (1921) shows a bourgeois interior where objects - a lamp, a carpet, a vase - seem to float in an indefinite space. The portrait of his wife Gabrielle, "Woman Reading" (1922), closes the journey with a closed face, a closed book, and silence.
Despite minor curatorial reservations about potentially softening some of Vallotton's more challenging social commentary, the exhibition succeeds in restoring the complexity of an unclassifiable artist who was simultaneously satirical engraver, intimate painter, and clinical observer of modernity. The thematic approach highlights continuities - the gaze, silence, geometry - rather than ruptures, placing Vallotton within a history of modern perception. The retrospective runs until February 15, 2026, at the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, offering visitors a comprehensive view of an artist whose unflinching, humorous, and merciless gaze remains eternally relevant.
