Félix Vallotton at the Royal Academy: the forgotten master of eerie estrangement

“A Manet for the impecunious” was Gertrude Stein’s sneer at Félix Vallotton. She hardly helped, acquiring without payment his large, imposing though cruel portrait of her. Head pulled back from the picture plane, she wears a vast unbelted brown corduroy robe and a Chinese chain of lapis and malachite: like a mountain circled by a stony path, she is domed, huge, hard, remote, ageless. “He made a crayon sketch and then began painting at the top of the canvas straight across . . . it was like pulling down a curtain as slowly moving as one of his Swiss glaciers,” she recalled.

The difficulty in taking sensuous pleasure from Vallotton’s cold, inscrutable art is what makes it interesting, and probably also why it has remained obscure. The Royal Academy’s Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet is the first UK retrospective of the Swiss painter — there was a print show in 1976 — and is so diverse in style that when the crates were unpacked, the art handlers thought that paintings by various, different artists had mistakenly been dispatched to London.

Stein’s portrait, painted in 1907, acknowledges Picasso’s flat, mask-like depiction of the ponderous writer from two years earlier, and attempts, absurdly, to improve it — by imitating Ingres’s full volumes and smooth, grand manner. Vallotton wanted to be a classicist, but his major early effort, a take on the nymphs of ancient myth, is as flat as a paper cut-out. A score of nudes of all ages, struggling into undergarments, wrestling with towels, disport themselves in and around a red-brick swimming pool in the frieze-like “Bathing on a Summer Evening”, which crosses the compressed elegance of Japanese prints with deliberate clumsiness. Displayed in Paris in 1892-93, the work was greeted with derision.

From the same year comes the cool linear clarity of “The Sick Girl”: an indifferent maid, spotlit, enters a stage set such as those Vallotton designed for experimental Paris theatre productions of Ibsen and Strindberg. In 1898-99 he surprises again, with the stark “The Ball”, a high-angled, skyless expanse of park where a lone child flutters in pursuit of a dab of red, and with his outlandish detailed triptych “Le Bon Marché”, casting the world’s first department store as a temple to Mammon, its bright, beribboned central staircase thronging with stony-faced, thrusting shoppers, like Liberty’s before Christmas.

So Vallotton is contradictory: an artist who, following Manet, embraced Baudelaire’s “painting of modern life”, yet avoided every modern style — Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism — that ruled Paris during his three-decade career there. Briefly associated with his contemporaries Bonnard and Vuillard — all born 1865-68 — for his domestic scenes, he was nicknamed “le Nabi étranger”: a foreigner and also a master of eerie estrangement. His 1890s hard-edged interiors, with their clear, dry application of paint and opposing colour blocks, actually have little in common with the complex, painterly textural harmonies of the French Nabis.

Unlike them, Vallotton achieves narrative menace by chromatic dissonance, foreboding space: sharp shadows hem in the figure semi-concealed behind a curtain in “Waiting”; glaring crimsons and oranges jar against the furtive couple in a doorway in “The Red Room”. In “The Visit”, where a man takes by the hand a statuesque woman in a sweeping violet coat, as if to waltz across a room of austere geometric patterning, who leads whom to the half-open door? In “The Lie”, against a backcloth of chunky furniture in deep red modulations, a couple embrace, the black legs of his trousers enclosing her seeping scarlet form. She blushes, whispering in his ear; he smiles smugly. Which is the liar, or does Vallotton’s title imply that sexual relationships are generally based on deceit?

Two years after painting this, Vallotton in 1899 shocked his bohemian friends by making a bourgeois marriage to Gabrielle, widowed daughter of the Bernheim Jeune dealers. His first family portrait, “Dinner By Lamplight” resembles a still from a Hitchcock film: in looming darkness, Vallotton is an enormous spreading black shadow, a predatory intruder seen from behind, facing his terrified little stepdaughter across a formal supper table.

This painting is informed by Vallotton’s superb print series “Intimacies” (1898): reductive woodcut satires on erotic power games enacted in airless interiors, evoked in passages of pristine white against undifferentiated jet black. Vallotton was lead illustrator for the avant-garde Revue blanche, whose contributors included Proust — and in these assertive designs he is at his most formally innovative. Figures, often pushed to guilty corners of the composition, emerge stealthily — the man with greedily outstretched hand is a sinister extension of the black mass occupying three quarters of the surface of “Money” — or disappear into their surroundings: the adulterers in “Five O’Clock” (“cinq à sept” connotes illicit after-office encounters), the alienated pair dwarfed by a plant in “The Irreparable”.

After his marriage, Vallotton made fewer prints; the Revue blanche closed in 1903. But the noir sensibility, already present in his Hopper-like oil portrait of the magazine’s editor, “Felix Fenéon”, working at night by a window, the dark panes framing piles of blank white paper, intensifies in his best paintings from the 1900s. Fringed by electric-green grass, a pool of black water in “The Pond” ripples into the shape of a big predatory fish. In “The Theatre Box”, an uncommunicative couple peer out from a deep dark space; a single white-gloved hand rests on the rail, casting a shadow on a swath of bright yellow balcony, finished with lively, playful brushstrokes that counter the tension within the box.

These have no obvious place in the trajectory of French art, nor did Vallotton seek one: “my hatred of Italian painting has increased, also of our French painting . . . long live the north”, he wrote. Perhaps he was thinking of Edvard Munch, whom he recalls in shrill, simplified landscapes such as “Sunset, Grey-blue High Sea” and “Sunset, Villerville”.

Nonetheless, Vallotton, a naturalised Frenchman, was patriotic and disappointed to be rejected (too old) for service in 1914. His response was “C’est la Guerre!”, a print series glorifying war, published at his expense. A better war painting is “Red Peppers” (1915), shrivelling and garish, with a bloodied knife.

After the war, Vallotton’s neo-classicising aspect found resonance in the return-to-order of all European painting, but his heavy nudes are his weakest works and curator Ann Dumas, selecting with flair from Vallotton’s extremely uneven oeuvre, wisely excludes most of them. Her excellent show introduces to London a minor but intriguing artist who fused academic tradition with something approaching magic realism, and demonstrated truculent independence against the powerful sweep of modern art history.

Royal Academy, London, to September 29; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 29-January 26

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