Brooks Riley in Art At First Sight:
Sometimes it pays to spend more time in the detours of art history—leaving behind the rigor mortis of the canon to follow new pathways—not necessarily toward an alternative canon, but to discover forgotten artists deserving of more attention.
The half-century of art between 1880 and 1930 was explosively innovative, with a burgeoning middle class now taking up the joys of painting, birthing multiple new ‘isms’—painters extricating themselves from the myopic, bourgeois poetry of impressionism and probing in all directions with anarchic glee, as they tried to find their single voice within the noise of impending modernism.
One of those painters was the Swiss artist Félix Vallotton. For reasons that I am still trying to figure out, I have fallen for the works of Vallotton, not a household name in art history, but one of the most perplexing and intriguing artists of the period. There is no nutshell to reduce him to, no ‘ism’ to give him a lasting home (the Nabis were more of a brotherhood), no one specific style to make him recognizable, no pathology to explain his subject matter (500 nudes) or his drive (nearly 2000 works).
More here.
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