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Modernism's Disquiet
John Haberin New York City
Félix Vallotton
Claudia Hart in Ruins
Modernism brought an explosion of color and a reconfigured reality. Could one who helped bring it on, then, have dedicated himself to realism in mostly black and white? The Met introduces Félix Vallotton darkly, as the "Painter of Disquiet." The disquiet only grows at the very dawn of a new century and a deepening into color.
Even before that, in a painting that the Met singles out for its exhibition banner, a couple embrace almost violently just inside a closed door. Will they ever make it to a genuine intimacy or, for that matter, the back room? Can they defy the stares of the viewer or, across the rug, an empty chair? Their heads line up with a landscape on the back wall. 
Can Vallotton ever align it or his work with modernity? The disquiet deepens yet again in the present, as Claudia Hart revisits Fauvism as a video game with no winners, but for Vallotton it was there all along.
Intimacy and inner tension
Disquiet must sound like a strange way to describe the prelude to modern art. For Henri Matisse and, before him, the painters of the Nabis, art was erupting into pure pleasure, pure line, and pure color. For defenders of the public, it was becoming a scandal—starting at the very least with Edouard Manet and the Salon des Refusés in 1873. And they, in turn, were erupting into outrage. For one member of the Nabis, though, emotions were simmering slowly from within, and the sobriety of his art could barely contain them. For Félix Vallotton, every day in Paris stood on the edge of a riot.
Born in 1865 in Switzerland, with a conservative upbringing, he came to France at age sixteen to discover what art was making possible, and even now art is reeling from the possibilities then. Claude Monet and Impressionism had unleashed color and vision, on the way to Paul Gauguin and his stranger colors and inner visions. It had spurred Paul Cézanne to reassemble vision piece by piece. By the 1890s, Vallotton had found common ground with others who admired those artists, including Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Maurice Denis. As the Nabis, they favored flattened interiors populated by still life and women. They developed, too, a taste for Japanese art, and there Vallotton led the way.
For his peers, as for Paul Cézanne, those interiors dissolved into color, with tight compositions and loose brushwork informed by Post-Impressionism and Japanese screens. For Vallotton, flatness and color could barely contain the darker emotions within. A sick girl lies in bed in 1892, her odor of death close to that of Edvard Munch. The feet of her bed come forward, toward chair caning that helps measure out every inch of the cramped bedroom. At right, a servant emerges from the painting's narrow depths, with a cup of tea. She could be bringing the ordinary comforts of a day in bed, a desperate cure, or a poison.
Elsewhere, faces may remain hidden, as if in shame, or, as in a portrait of Félix Fénéon labor in silence. Patterns and edges stay hard, firm, and clear. The concern for surfaces and appearances seems a matter not just of painting, but of human psychology and bourgeois existence. In a self-portrait at age twenty, Vallotton stares coolly and dresses respectably, not in a painter's smock. Seventeen years later, he is wearing much the same dark suit and Protestant sobriety in a group portrait of the Nabis, and so are the others. Their awkward group pose makes them appear to belong anywhere but together.
By that time, they had in fact broken up, and Vallotton was continuing his dialogue between formal intimacy and inner tension on his own. He paints lovers stealing a kiss at home, even when a title suggests a failure to connect. He paints them barely visible above the balcony of an opera house. It becomes harder and harder to know public from private spaces, but both are a kind of theater. It becomes harder, too, to know whether Paris is altogether a spectacle or you are an unwelcome voyeur. He calls a series of woodcuts his Intimités, and he also brought several of them into paint.
Not that his portrait sitters ever lose their composure. His wife, Gabrielle, stretches one arm confidently across a sofa, looking every bit the daughter of a wealthy dealer who enabled her husband to paint full time. A clothed black woman and a white female nude share a canvas, unblinking, in a pointed revision of Manet's Olympia. Gertrude Stein has her portrait, too, here right next to the more famous one from the Met's collection by Pablo Picasso. Vallotton's looks that much more conservative by comparison. You may have to look twice to notice that the two portraits have the same wide eyes, placement of hands, and overall oval—the elements that make Stein refuse to go away.
The scene of a crime
His Intimités were not his first woodcuts. Where Bonnard looked to Japanese screens, Vallotton saw even Japan in broad areas of black and white. The medium for him has lost its associations with the virtuosity of Albrecht Dürer or the earthy truths of folk art. It has become part of the spectacle of modern Paris. He shows people rushing together at a world's fair or in a department store, Bon Marché, then still a novelty and madly fashionable. He shows them in the meditative solitude of musicians, set apart from an orchestra.
The curator, Dita Amory, opens with a room for them before returning later to the Intimités. The latter, from 1897 and 1898, bear such loaded titles as Money and The Lie. Already, though, he is pursuing the tension between public and private, and he locates the tension in modern life. It has implications for politics and class as well—and not just in a crowded department store. Woodcuts depict a murder, an accident, and an execution, probably that of an anarchist. If riots greeted Igor Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring in 1913, years after Alfred Jarry and Ubu Roi, Paris twenty years before was already the scene of demonstrations.
For Vallotton, modern life is always a crime scene, but over time, like his early musicians, he learns to look within. He finds the love of his life and a little money on the side. He becomes almost comfortable with color. In his years with the Nabis, he brings it to some of the same broad areas as in his woodcuts, but in paint. They have a touch of prints for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and anticipations of linocuts, like those of Kyle Staver today. The department store becomes a triptych.
The group portrait marks his renunciation of the Nabis as well as its celebration, and the tensions turn further within. Still lifes bulge, and landscapes take on an uncanny light. Interiors deepen into clashing blues and reds. He bought a Kodak in 1899 as a means to painting and took it with him and Gabrielle up the Loire and to Normandy. Where Claude Monet had painted the cliffs of Etretat, Vallotton prefers a child in a red room. It could be a younger version of the sick girl from a decade before.
When he paints outdoors, he sticks to the last rays of sunset. When he paints supper, the family is hardly able to find its way to food or one another in the dark. Sunsets, though, glow from within. The Met compares them to Symbolism, the movement from Frederic Leighton to Hilma af Klint. Vallotton, though, is anything but a mystic. At their most mysterious, the late work has more in common with "magic realism."
This artist distrusts magic at that, and the realism may yet point to politics. In a still life from 1915, at the depths of World War I, the knife set before a tray of red peppers bears a smear of red. Is it the paste spread of a luxury menu or the blood of war? In any event, Vallotton was tapering off well before his death in 1925. His greatest output and most provocative work date from little more than ten years without quite crossing into modern art. It turns on his sobriety among colorists and at the scene of a crime.
Modernism's escape room
If Modernism had a single birth date, it might be the day that Henri Matisse finished The Joy of Life. Pablo Picasso had emerged from his Blue Period, but with Cubism still to come. Henri Matisse, meanwhile, looks back to an imagined golden age, but with a sexual freedom unknown in Paris in 1905. He also recreates art's then recent past as sheer color. Tall, arched trees shelter and frame a shoreline bathed in yellow—with human bathers reduced to bare but sensual outlines, pairing off in the nude. If Parisians out for Sunday in the park with Georges Seurat had torn off their fashionable clothing and torn into each other, they might have come to this.
Modern art this summer, with museums closed and many beaches off-limits, was harder to come by and pleasure harder still—and Claudia Hart was already questioning both in a "virtual exhibition," an interactive time line of art history. Now her fall opening has plenty of life, a touch of Matisse, and some serious limits on joy. It starts with her video take on The Red Room from 1908, a painting more daring still than The Joy of Life. You may recognize it from the large table, the chair at left, the woman at right, and the patterning that overflows and connects them all. If colors for Matisse seem to shift before your eyes, they do so digitally for Hart, giving the woman an eerie mask or cloak. Hart constrains them further, too, by closing in a bit and blocking the view out the window with denser greenery.
She has other ways to extend and to constrain Matisse as well. Her woman no longer condescends to pour drinks. And where he continued the tablecloth's design into painted wallpaper, her show has actual wall designs, much like his flowery ones. She translates other work by him and Picasso into video, too. Where they introduced the flatness of design into representation, she uses computer modeling to lend her spaces the illusion of 3D. She and they might be puzzling out together where realism or abstraction begins and ends.
It may not end well. She names the show for its largest animation, The Ruins. A triptych, it has a still greater depth, but as dead ends. Hart describes it as a gamer's escape room from which there is no escape. For decades now, artists have often felt the same about Modernism. They have criticized the aura of (male) genius and the "originality of the avant-garde," and Hart sees the promise of the digital as tied up in copyright infringement. Not that she needs legal permission to riff on the art of museums, but she can always boast of refusing to obtain it.
She infringes on herself at that. The show's single sculpture is a vase on a table on a pedestal, all in a hard plastic white over wood. It began as a copy after a still life after Henri Fantin-Latour, a conservative artist older than Matisse—and (so much for pleasure) as a momento mori, or meditation on death. Then she analyzed it on computer, 3D printed the results, and copied those freely. Postmodern theory may seem a little stale itself at this point. Still, even in new media, Hart can remind you why painting is back.
Modernism will not sit still as an easy target. It had many births, in competing movements, and their art was always citing and questioning itself. Nor is Hart's game all that bleak, whatever she dares you to think. If The Red Room has become the harsher video colors of The Orange Room, she also has space for her Big Red. That "augmented reality wallpaper" is a Joyful Noise. The joy of life is still on hold in art after Covid-19 and Covid New York, but Hart suggests a way out.
Félix Vallotton ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 26, 2020, and Claudia Hart at Bitforms through November 1.