On occasional trips to Switzerland, I had been captivated by his work on view at the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva. So I was thrilled by the chance to stage an exhibition on this ‘very singular Vallotton’, as Thadée Natanson, co-founder of the avant-garde cultural journal La Revue blanche, described him in the early 1890s. In Britain, apart from an exhibition of his prints put on by the Arts Council in 1976, there has never been a major show of his work. Although Vallotton has always been admired in his native Switzerland – the majority of his works remain in Swiss museums and private collections – he has received scant recognition elsewhere. This highly individual artist has never received the attention bestowed on his more famous ‘brethren’ in the Nabis group, Bonnard and Vuillard.
I have always been intrigued by Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) – by his strangeness, his acerbic wit, his offbeat colour, and his odd position outside the mainstream artistic currents of his time.
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