Félix Vallotton – Claire de Lune
- Alan Whittle
- Apr 15
- 5 min read
Leafing through a book I had picked up at a second-hand bookshop some time ago, a full-colour monograph on Félix Vallotton which I hadn’t yet looked through properly, I was surprised to find tucked inside some magazine clippings and a couple of museum postcards featuring the work of the artist. I guess that the bookseller had ignored them (or overlooked them) but I always find this kind of discovery a serendipitous pleasure, and an opportunity to speculate on somebody else’s interests, to find myself intrigued by another life I will never know.
In a sense, the piquing of curiosity is what often first draws in the viewer of Valloton’s art, so the chance discovery of another’s cache seemed entirely appropriate. Of his most famous works, what, we might ask ourselves, is going on in a scene like that shown in Le Chambre Rouge (1898) or in L’argent, Intimités V (1898).
What dramas are we witnessing, what murmured coercion, what furtive pressure or gaslighting maybe? These and many other of his paintings invite speculation, they make voyeurs of us, ignorant witnesses to inscrutable domestic tragedies. We find ourselves narrativizing from image and title to fill in the gaps.
I was familiar with the work of Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) as I had researched Nabis art (he was a notable figure in that movement) while studying at The Courtauld, and I had also recently read Bridget Alsdorf brilliant book Gawkers, which majors on his woodblock prints primarily, as a basis for a study on the idea of the late nineteenth century Parisian badaud, the gawking onlookers witnessing events in the street that have drawn their attention - a funeral procession, a demonstration, an arrest, an accident. The badaud is not the same as the flâneur, and altogether more a crowd-dwelling onlooker than a strolling man of leisure. However, fascinating as these prints are, I do find myself drawn to Valloton’s landscapes which are sometimes overlooked by critics who often focus on the woodblock prints and the troubling interiors, at their expense. They have a similar mysterious quality to them, a sense of otherness that, although straightforwardly aesthetically pleasing, are also charged with a perplexing and unnerving strangeness.
In fact, Vallotton’s friends sometimes referred to him as le nabi étranger, meaning not just a foreigner (he was Swiss born) but surely also referring to the preternaturalness of his art. His upbringing was firmly in the Calvinist middle-class tradition but at the first opportunity he escaped to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian. He later supported himself by working as a restorer, an engraver, as a critic, and as a printmaker. But although clearly a social creature, and fully engagé (he was very vocal in his support of Dreyfus for example, and deployed his printmaking skills to savagely satirise the other side in the infamous affair) it is his separateness, his detachment that comes across from studies of his life and art, a remoteness that I think is given expression through a disquieting uncanniness in the landscapes.
Comparisons between Valloton’s work and Edward Hopper’s are not new and indeed, Hopper acknowledged the influence on several occasions (he visited Paris in 1906 and 1909). What interests me though is how both achieve a sense of the unheimlich. Incidentally, there is a superb essay on Hopper by Margaret Iverson, In the Blind Field: Hopper and the Uncanny which I would recommend, which uses Freud’s unheimlich concept to analyse the way in which Hopper fuses a sense of nostalgia with one of threat; the article also draws on similar sensibilities to be found in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
Vallotton’s landscapes are anti-naturalistic and as the example of Clair de lune shows, lean heavily instead on symbolist methods to express their mood. The symbolists eschewed real-world mimesis in favour of the imagined. They elevated the metaphysical and used suggestion and metaphor to adumbrate a mood or a feeling. What often comes across in Vallotton’s landscapes is a feeling of alienation. There are no people in Clair de lune and just one wind-blown solitary tree silhouetted to the right highlights the sense of aloneness. The moon’s light, from the sky and as reflected in the water, is ethereal, dreamy. There is beauty here, undoubtedly, but it is otherworldly, unfamiliar, eerie. The river is flattened, its perspective ‘wrong’, which diminishes any sense of familiarity and maximises the amount of reflection from it. It almost appears not as a river but as another opening onto the sky. The cloud masses from the right, threateningly, and is broken into amorphous wads, illuminated from behind by the moonshine. The doubling of moon and cloud in the river’s reflection is, at a banal level, the setting down of an ephemeral moment of natural brilliance, a delight in the beauty to be found in the accidental conjunction of moon, water and cloud. Yet at another level, the doubling is…, well…, troubling. It is unnatural. It seems hallucinatory, as if the world is seen through another dimension, obeying different laws of gravity, where topsy-turviness reigns.
Paul Verlaine’s poem of the same title, written in 1869, and which later inspired the music also with the same name by Claude Debussy, refers to un paysage choisi and Vallotton’s scene is similarly ‘chosen’ – it exists in the mind rather than in reality. However, the music and poem, both gently ‘triste et beau’, for me express a different response to moonlight than Vallotton’s. The artist was in the habit of sketching ideas outside which he would bring back to the studio for final composition, painting as much from imagination as he was from memory. His Paysage Composé though, is shaded with apprehension. It has the feeling of standing outside time and the emptiness of the scene seems desolate, despite the appeal of the mirage.
Some of Georgio De Chirico’s landscapes, for example The Red Tower (1913) conjure similar feelings of disquietude.
Again empty of people, and having the intensity of a dream whose meaning is elusive, the hard shadow and the dark sky lightening at the horizon seem at odds with one another. Looking at the painting feels like suffering an episode of perplexing dissociation, as if we have been transported to another world similar to ours, but an unfeasible one, where we feel no belonging, where we are exiles and utterly alone.
Critics have pointed to the influence of Japanese woodblock prints on Vallotton’s work and there is something in the apparent want of emotion in Clair de Lune that is suggestive of this. Above all though, it may be that it is the use of blacks in Clair de Lune that unsettles. The painting juxtaposes the radiance of the moon with the unknowability of the unilluminated darkness below it. The moon itself of course remains unknowable as inhabiting another unearthly sphere; it too reflects light, the light of the sun onto the earth, fixed paradoxically only by the moving river. So, the doubling of the river reflection is itself a doubling of the invisible sun. I don’t want to suggest anything unduly ontological in Vallotton’s painting, but it may be that it is what we can’t see that concerns the artist as much as what we can.
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