At the Café (also known as The Provincial)

Félix Edouard Vallotton was a Swiss/French painter and printmaker associated with Les Nabis. He is also one of my favourite artists, so I am so glad I can present one of his pieces today :) It isn't easy tracking him down. Many of his paintings remain in private hands (like today's At the Café), and unless you go to Switzerland, you are unlikely to come across more than a couple hanging together. But there is another reason why he has sometimes been bypassed and undervalued. He is a painter who, more than any other I can think of, ranges from high quality to true awfulness. And his honesty and brutality in showing social behaviors and relationship can be truly bitter - perhaps this is why I like him so much. Vallotton's paintings of the post-Nabi period found admirers who generally respected them for their truthfulness and their technical qualities, but the severity of his style was frequently criticized. In an issue of Neue Zürcher Zeitung, critics complained that Vallotton "paints like a policeman, like someone whose job it is to catch forms and colors. Everything creaks with an intolerable dryness ... the colors lack all joyfulness." In its uncompromising character his art prefigured the New Objectivity that flourished in Germany during the 1920s and had a further parallel in the work of Edward Hopper. First time I saw Vallotton, on a great exhibition in Grand Palais in Paris in 2013, I immediately fell in love with his works. Hope you will like them too.