VALLOTTON, Félix

Swiss woodcutGLOSSARYA print made from a wood block. The design is drawn on a smooth block of wood and then cut out, leaving the design standing up in relief the design to be printed. The person who carved the woodcut often worked to a design by another artist. artist and painter. Associated with the NabisGLOSSARYLes Nabis were a group of Post-Impressionist avant-garde artists who set the pace for fine arts and graphic arts in France in the 1890s. Initially a group of friends interested in contemporary art and literature, most of them studied at the private art school of Rodolphe Julian (Académie Julian) in Paris in the late 1880s. Paul Sérusier galvanized Les Nabis, and provided the name and disseminated the example of Paul Gauguin among them. Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis became the best known of the group., he worked in Paris. Vallotton rejuvenated the woodcut medium as a creative technique. His boldly cut designs, conceived as arrangements in black and white, depict Parisian society with wit and intelligence.

Vallotton studied at the Julian Academy in Paris. During the years 1891-98 he worked primarily in the technique of wood engravingGLOSSARYA print made from a metal plate that has had a design cut into it with a sharp point. Ink is smeared over the plate and then wiped off, the ink remaining in the etched lines being transferred when the plate is pressed very firmly onto a sheet of paper.. His psychologically expressive portraits of writers (the woodcut Dostoevsky, 1895) and the spiritually revealing scenes from Parisian life (the series Story of a Certain Crime and Intimacy), constructed by means of a tense combination of white and deep black spots, are extremely laconic.

Later Vallotton painted nudes, interiors, and landscapes in which forms are reproduced with a cold precision and in a sharply patterned space.