Félix Vallotton in the Villa Flora
6 October 2007 to 28 September 2008
[ Deutsche Version ] [ Version française]
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| Felix Vallotton La Blanche et la Noire, 1913 |
For our Vallotton exhibition, we have taken the historical context of Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler’s collection as our starting point. Within the collection, which focused primarily on the Nabis group, Félix Vallotton (1865 Lausanne – 1925 Paris) was, along with Bonnard, one of the foremost artists represented. Indeed, the collection contains more works by Vallotton than by any other artist. What is more, he acted as their artistic advisor right from the start and remained in close contact with them throughout his life. This relationship is documented in the large volume of letters exchanged by Hedy Hahnloser and Vallotton, who began corresponding in May 1908 after the couple had taken the first bold step of purchasing his nude Baigneuse. They went on to build up an extensive collection of Vallotton’s work from every period of his artistic career, representing every genre he worked in. As such, it gives a fascinating insight into the development of his oeuvre. Accordingly, the exhibition gives the same weight to each of the genres, be they interiors or still lifes, urban scenes or landscapes, portraits, nudes or mythological scenes. For the most part, we have been able to draw upon the extensive holdings of the Hahnloser/Jäggli Foundation at Villa Flora and on works that were formerly part of the collection but which have since been distributed among the heirs of Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser-Bühler.
Hedy Hahnloser’s enthusiastic patronage of Vallotton has also proved to be an important factor. She inspired her relatives and friends to purchase his works, many of which complement her own superb collection. As a result, groups of paintings Vallotton had intended as pendants or cycles have actually been kept together. For instance, in 1909, Hedy bought Vallotton’s Soir antique (1904), showing a group of nymphs pursued by fauns. That same year, her cousin Richard Bühler purchased the pendant Penthée (now privately owned) which shows the pursuit of Pentheus by the Maenads who are about to tear him limb from limb in a bacchic frenzy. These two works, in which Vallotton interprets ancient mythology along the lines of a modern-day battle of the sexes, have now been brought together in our exhibition for the first time in many years.
In 1909, the couple purchased Tas de sable blanc and Les chalands, bords de Seine, both from Vallotton’s famous 1901 Bords de Seine series, while Arthur’s brother Emil Hahnloser bought Le Pont-Neuf, which he later donated to the Kunstmuseum Winterthur. Two further works from this series, La fumée and Pêcheurs à la ligne, were acquired in 1910, through Hedy’s instigation, by her cousin Hans Schuler, who was a member of the purchasing commission of the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft from 1912 to 1920. Given that these works, now in private hands, have not been exhibited since 1938, it gives us enormous pleasure to be able to show these paintings together, as a series, for the first time in many decades. In this cycle of Paris scenes, Vallotton shifts his attention away from the teeming streets and squares of the modern city to take a critical look at the other face of the developing metropolis: the changes wrought in the urban landscape by industrialisation and technical progress.
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| Felix Vallotton La grève blanche, Vasouy, 1913, Villa Flora |
Another example of the couple’s careful coordination of acquisitions that forms a highlight of the exhibition is a group of paintings of self-assured black women: La Blanche et la Noire and Négresse à la cruche (1913), both from the Hahnloser Collection, and both featuring the same model – described by Vallotton as «une négresse superbe» – as well as the remarkable La Mulâtresse from the former Richard Bühler Collection. The large-format La Blanche et la Noire is one of four monumental paintings by Vallotton that Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser purchased, indicating their willingness to take the risk of acquiring some of the artist’s more difficult works. It is the only one still held by the Hahnloser/Jäggli Foundation at the Villa Flora. The other three have since been donated to museums by Hedy Hahnloser and her heirs: Le repos des modèles (1905) and L’homme poignardé (1916) are now at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, while L’enlèvement d’Europe (1908) is at the Kunstmuseum Bern. Evidently, they were collecting not only for themselves, but with the benefit of public museums in mind as well. Indeed, they were particularly enthusiastic in their support for the construction and collection of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, which opened in 1916.
La Blanche et la Noire is the most complex work in the exhibition and, in its highly charged juxtaposition of a white nude and a black woman, it is also the most provocative. Vallotton does not deploy the hierarchical approach, so common in nineteenth century orientalist painting, of portraying the black woman in a subservient role to the white woman, but depicts her as an emancipated individual, her lit cigarette marking her out as a modern Parisian. For all the painting’s socio-political and art historical references, Vallotton’s typical twists of irony and ambiguitygive it many possible meanings, leaving it wide open to interpretation.
Ursula Perucchi-Petri
A catalogue will accompany the exhibition: Félix Vallotton in der Villa Flora,edited by Ursula Perucchi-Petri, with texts by Angelika Affentranger-Kirchrath, Margrit Hahnloser-Ingold and Ursula Perucchi-Petri. 135 pages, 50 colour plates and 12 black and white plates, 23x28 cm
ISBN 978-3-7165-1486-3
The exhibition Félix Vallotton. Idylle am Abgrund at Kunsthaus Zürich from 5 October 2007 to 13 January 2008 presents the artist as a social critic willing to scratch the surface of the bourgeois idyll and even caricature it, whose art remains thought-provoking and fascinating to this very day.
Translation: Ishbel Flett
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| Garden with Sculpture of Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) L'été, 1910, Villa Flora, Winterthur, Switzerland |
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