Today’s Painting
今日画作
Félix Vallotton is one of my favorite painters ever. I have always been intrigued by his strangeness, wit, weird color, and his odd position outside the mainstream artistic currents of his time.
费利克斯·瓦洛顿是我最喜欢的画家之一。我一直被他吸引，被他陌生，机智又怪异的色彩吸引，被他独立于他那个时代主流艺术潮流之外吸引。
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.
虽然瓦洛顿在他的故乡瑞士一直受人钦佩（他的大部分作品仍保存在瑞士博物馆和私人收藏家中），但他在其他地方却很少获得认可。
He was a master of narrative suspense, his series of interior scenes from 1897–1899 offers a voyeuristic lens onto private worlds of forbidden love and heartbreak—ambiguous scenarios that find echoes in the work of Edward Hopper.
他在叙事悬念上是大师，他在1897年至1899年的一系列室内场景中创造了一个偷窥的视角，去探寻私人世界里的禁忌之爱与难过心碎，这些模糊的场景与爱德华·霍珀的作品有所共鸣。
That cinematic quality, which was undoubtedly influenced by Vallotton’s interest in theater, could even have found its way into the films of Alfred Hitchcock, while his unique color palette is comparable to the film sets of Wes Anderson.
这种电影的高质画面，无疑受到了瓦洛顿对戏剧作品的兴趣的影响，甚至可以在阿尔弗雷德·希区柯克的电影中找到，而他独特的调色板可以与韦斯·安德森的电影背景相媲美。
Artist Introduction
画家简介
Félix Edouard Vallotton was a Swiss/French painter and printmaker associated with Les Nabis. He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut.
费利克斯·爱德华·瓦洛顿是与那比派相关的瑞士/法国画家和版画家。他在现代木刻画发展中起到重要作用。
He was born into a conservative middle-class family in Lausanne, and there he attended Collège Cantonal, graduating with a degree in classical studies in 1882. In that year he moved to Paris to study art under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Académie Julian. He spent many hours in the Louvre, where he greatly admired the works of Holbein, Dürer and Ingres; these artists would remain exemplars for Vallotton throughout his life. Vallotton's earliest paintings, chiefly portraits, are firmly rooted in the academic tradition. In 1885 he painted the Ingresque Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbachas well as his first painted self-portrait (seen at left), which received an honorable mention at the Salon des artistes français in 1886.
他出生于洛桑一个保守的中产阶级家庭，他就读于当地的州学院，于1882毕业，并获得了古典研究学位。同年，他移居巴黎，在朱利安学院的儒勒·约瑟夫·勒费弗和古斯塔夫·布朗厄尔的指导下学习艺术。他在卢浮宫度过了很多时光，在那里他非常欣赏霍尔拜因，丢勒和英格里斯的作品。这些艺术家成为瓦洛顿一生的榜样。瓦尔洛顿最早的绘画作品，主要是肖像画，深深地植根于学术传统。1885年，他创作了《乌尔森巴赫先生的安格尔风格肖像》，以及他的第一幅自画像（见左侧），这幅画在1886年获得了法国美术沙龙的荣誉奖。
During the following decade Vallotton painted, wrote art criticism and made a number of prints. In 1891 he executed his first woodcut, a portrait of Paul Verlaine. The many woodcuts he produced during the 1890s were recognized as innovative, and established Vallotton as a leader in the revival of true woodcut as an artistic medium.
在随后的十年中，瓦洛顿继续绘画，写艺术批评并创作了许多版画。1891年，他完成了自己第一幅木刻画《保罗·韦兰的肖像》。他在1890年代创作了许多木刻作品，这些作品被认为富有创新性，并确立了瓦洛顿在木刻复兴为艺术媒介的领导者地位。
In the western world, the relief print, in the form of commercial wood engraving, had long been utilized mainly as a means to accurately reproduce drawn or painted images and, latterly, photographs. Vallotton's woodcut style was novel in its starkly reductive opposition of large masses of undifferentiated black and areas of unmodulated white. Vallotton emphasized outline and flat patterns, and generally eliminated the gradations and modeling traditionally produced by hatching. He was influenced by post-Impressionism, Symbolism, and especially by the Japanese woodcut: a large exhibition of ukiyo-e prints had been presented at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890, and Vallotton, like many artists of his era an enthusiast of Japonism, collected these prints.
在西方世界，以商业木版画形式出现的浮雕版画，长期以来一直主要用来精确再现素描或绘画以及之后照片。瓦洛顿的木刻风格非常新颖，它完全简化，与没区分的大团黑色和未调制的白色区域形成鲜明对比。瓦洛顿强调轮廓和平面图案，一般而言消除了传统绘画方式所产生的渐变和造型。他受到后印象派，象征主义尤其是日本木刻的影响：1890年在巴黎高等美术学院举办了大型浮世绘版画展览，如那个时代许多的艺术家一样，瓦洛顿也痴迷日本风潮，并收集了这些印刷品。
His woodcut subjects included domestic scenes, bathing women, portrait heads, and several images of street crowds and demonstrations—notably, several scenes of police attacking anarchists. He usually depicted types rather than individuals, eschewed the expression of strong emotion, and "fuse[d] a graphic wit with an acerbic if not ironic humor". Vallotton's graphic art reached its highest development in Intimités (Intimacies), a series of ten interiors published in 1898 by the Revue Blanche, which deal with tension between men and women. Vallotton's woodcuts were widely disseminated in periodicals and books in Europe as well as in the United States, and have been suggested as a significant influence on the graphic art of Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
他的木刻主题包括家庭场景，沐浴的妇女，头像，以及几张街头人群和示威游行的图像，尤其是几个关于警察袭击无政府主义者的场景。他通常描绘类型而不是个人，避免表达强烈的情感，并且“将图形化的风趣与尖刻或者讽刺的幽默融为一体”。瓦洛顿的版画艺术在《亲密关系》中达到了最高发展，这是瑞尤·布兰奇在1898年推出的一系列十种内饰，旨在处理男女之间的紧张关系。瓦洛顿的木版画在欧洲和美国的期刊和书籍中得到了广泛传播，并被认为对爱德华·蒙克，奥布里·比兹利和恩斯特·路德维希·基希纳的版画艺术具有重大影响。
By 1892 he was affiliated with Les Nabis, a group of young artists that included Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Édouard Vuillard, with whom Vallotton was to form a lifelong friendship. During the 1890s, when Vallotton was closely allied with the avant-garde, his paintings reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail. His subjects included genre scenes, portraits and nudes. Examples of his Nabi style are the deliberately awkward Bathers on a Summer Evening (1892–93), now in the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the symbolist Moonlight (1895), in the Musée d'Orsay.
1892年，他加入那比派，这群青年艺术家包括皮埃尔·邦纳德，克尔·泽维尔·罗素，莫里斯·丹尼斯和爱德华·威拉德，瓦洛顿与他们建立了终身的友谊。在1890年代，瓦洛顿与先锋派紧密结盟，他的画作反映了他的木刻风格，平坦的色彩区域，坚硬的边缘和简化的细节。他的主题包括流派场景，肖像和裸体。他反映那比派风格的作品有刻意笨拙的《夏夜里的泳客》（1892-93），现存于苏黎世美术馆，以及象征主义风格的《月光》（1895），现存于奥赛博物馆。
In 1899 Vallotton married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, a wealthy young widow with three children, and in 1900 he attained French citizenship. Around 1899, his printmaking activity diminished as he concentrated on painting, developing a sober, often bitter realism independently of the artistic mainstream. His Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1907) was painted as an apparent response to Picasso's portrait of the previous year, and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein described the very methodical way in which Vallotton painted it, working from top to bottom as if lowering a curtain across the canvas.
1899年，瓦洛顿与加布里埃尔·罗德里格斯·亨里克斯结婚，她是一个富有又年轻的寡妇，有三个孩子。他于1900年获得法国国籍。1899年左右，他的版画活动逐渐减少，因为他专注于绘画，发展出一种清醒又时常苦涩的写实主义，独立于艺术主流之外。他的《格特鲁德·斯坦因的肖像》（1907年）明显是在回应毕加索前一年创作的肖像，在《爱丽丝B自传》中，托克拉斯·斯坦因描述了瓦洛顿极有条理的绘画方式，从上到下地绘画，就像在画布上拉低了窗帘。
Vallotton's paintings of the post-Nabi period found admirers, and were generally respected for their truthfulness and their technical qualities, but the severity of his style was frequently criticized.Typical is the reaction of the critic who, writing in the March 23, 1910 issue of Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 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."[9] In its uncompromising character his art prefigured the New Objectivity that flourished in Germany during the 1920s, and has a further parallel in the work of Edward Hopper.
瓦洛顿在后那比派时期创作的画作广受仰慕，并因其真实性和优秀技巧而受到人们的尊敬，但他苛刻的风格经常遭到批评。其中一位评论家的反应很典型，他在1910年3月23日发行的那期《新祖尔日报》上抱怨瓦洛顿“像警察一样画画，好像他的工作就是要抓住形式和颜色。一切都叫嚣着令人难以忍受的干燥感...色彩缺乏欢愉”。他在艺术上毫不妥协，预示了1920年代在德国盛行的“新客观性”，他的作品现在仍与爱德华·霍珀的作品相提并论。
He continued to publish occasional art criticism, in addition to other writings. He wrote eight plays, some of which received performances (in 1904 and 1907), although their reviews appear to have been unfavorable. He also wrote three novels, including the semi-autobiographical La Vie meurtrière (The Murderous Life), begun in 1907 and published posthumously.
除其他著作外，他还继续发表不定期的艺术评论。他撰写了八部戏剧，其中一些曾获表演（在1904年和1907年），尽管他们的评论似乎并不理想。他还写了三本小说，其中包括半自传的《凶残的生活》，始于1907年，在他死后出版。