30 June — 29 September 2019
A gloved hand drums on a paper-thin ledge. A woman bangs her head against the ocean. A shadow chases a child, who chases a deflated ball. These standout pictures revel in the strangeness of the their own 2-D universes. Yet it’s precisely this ‘flatness’ which proves fatal.
Rarely shown and little known in the UK, The Royal Academy’s Felix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet reveals the Swiss artist to have been an illustrator through and through. Fellow ‘Nabis’ painters Bonnard and Vuillard made the transition from woodblock graphics to oils much more successfully- the active relationship between gesture, surface and image so crucial to great painting never fully comes alive in Vallotton. Rigorous or inventive as they can be in composition, even the best of the pictures remain inert as paintings.
Plenty of artists have mined the flatness of the picture plane, the ambiguities of spatial depth. Yet Vallotton organizes the picture as one might layer a woodcut, never truly engaging in the plasticity of the painted image. The mark-making is frequently pretty undifferentiated. There is a weakness to the drawing, a lack of authority in his suggestion of form, volume. Arms fail to meet hands. Eye-socket shadows float across heads. It’s often said that he anticipates the uncanniness of Hopper, his eerie interiors populated by ‘wooden’ figures. Yet Hopper’s weaknesses in modelling were shored up by inventive, unlikely-yet-subtle harmonies, a feeling of effort in the touch completely lacking in Vallotton’s flashy chromatics and lazy stylization.
The three works singled out above- The Theatre Box (1909) (1.), On the Beach (1899) (4.), The Ball (1899) (6.) - stand out a country mile as they make an emphatic feature of their own spatial shortcomings. A thematic feature, even.
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The Theatre Box reflects on the theatricality of its own cheap illusions. It recalls Goya’s Dog (c.1819-1823) (2.) in the division of space, the sense of peering into the unknown, though compare the listlessness of Vallotton’s marks to the sheer worked-ness of Goya’s ‘empty’ areas and the deft descriptiveness of the dog (3.)- as if the former had the idea of making a picture out of two blank flats but lost interest in actually painting them. There’s a general underlying failure of execution in many of the paintings, or an airless sense of colouring-in. They lack a physical authority (or even an authoritative flatness) that could help us accept the lady's hand is attached to her body, or that the hand touches the ledge, or that the man's truncated face occupies the same box. The ping-pong ball of her white glove enters our half of the court, but not definitively. The picture bats back and forth between these by turns problematic or thematic notions of flatness- a critical stalemate.
On the Beach is a queasy picture that somehow treads a line between the bleakness of Beckett and the banalities of Jack Vetrianno (5.) (all the problems of that artist turn up in Vallotton a hundred years early, yet with a cloying sense of their own très moderne daring). The sea seems impossibly close, ready to engulf the figures; the sky the colour of the grey sand, the one cloud a blue streak; the open ocean more like a flat wall. It perhaps muses on the stifling, constrictive roles of Child, Mother, and Nanny, all three trapped even while at leisure, taunted by the sea which both offers and denies escape.
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Good paintings, great paintings, have this charged relationship between formal construction and subject matter. Yet even in Vallotton’s best pictures it’s a little too easy, the little girl dwarfed by the ominous shadow in The Ball a little too over-played (The Pond (1909) (7.) is so simultaneously over-done in composition and lacklustre in execution it could be a rejected animation cel from Disney’s Fantasia). Mostly the pictures fail to do anything more than illustrate literally a certain mood or implied narrative. One visitor marvelled at the similarity of atmosphere between Vallotton’s claustrophobic interiors (backdrops to illicit affairs) and the contemporaneous plays of Ibsen. It’s regrettably hard not to see Vallotton’s as a ham performance though, the players bloodless cut-outs. ‘Literary’ in the most limited way, even Vallotton fan, novelist and co-curator Julian Barnes can admit the pictures range ‘from high quality to fierce awfulness’.
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It’s good that the RA are showing these paintings- not good that (as is common institutional practice) they are shown with little critical rigour. As far as the accompanying written material is concerned, all the paintings are Good, some Exceptional, none Bad. A shame, as co-curator/instigator Barnes has written candidly elsewhere of the bracing mixed-bag the artist presents for even the most ardent of fans. He claims that the RA show presents the very best of the artist’s work- but still Vallotton remains an interesting curiosity rather than a misplaced ‘genuis’ (a dirty word here on Sunny Blinking), whose copious output continues to drag itself down by its own shallowness. The show is a missed opportunity to really explore how, even with an inventive sense of composition and design, intense chromatics, charged subjects and scenarios (not to mention museum-baiting assonance with a wider cultural-historical milieu) a painting can still fall flat.
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