Felix Vallotton

[His] paintings often communicate - through a sly glance or a turn away from the viewer - that sense of mystery and drama that gives Vallotton's work its singular quality.--Samuel Reilly "The Economist" A brilliant pictorial wit, not just sardonic and sharp, as is often remarked, but full of sympathy.... his street scenes are alive with political tension and his interiors poke holes in the moral facade of the bourgeoisie.--Hrag Vartanian "Hyperallergic" A grand survey...--Lucy Davies "The Telegraph" As the first extensive Vallotton show in New York in decades, this exhibition is invaluable, despite its problems. It reintroduces an artist who achieved early greatness in the relatively modest medium of prints and then either failed or declined to follow a single path in painting. His work is a fascinating, frustrating thorn in the side of the modernist ideal of wholeness.--Roberta Smith "New York Times" Felix Vallotton brought a mordant eye to his scenes of Parisian life.--Brenda Cronin "Wall Street Journal" He invites us to invade a fraught private moment, almost always between a man and a woman: a quarrel, a disappointment, an assignation.--Bridget Alsdorf "London Review of Books" If it hadn't been Vallotton, someone else would have done it, with half of Paris high on ukiyo-e woodcuts ever since Japan had been forcibly opened for commerce in the 1850s. But we're lucky it was Vallotton, whose stark black-and-white prints, produced using matrices of soft pearwood, provide a singularly critical look at both private and public life.--Chase Madar "ARTnews" The forgotten master of eerie estrangement...--Jackie Wullschlager "Financial Times" Vallotton's scenes are almost proverbial in their miniature narratives.--Laura Cumming "Guardian" Vallotton's sensibility ... straddled two instincts: the desire to honestly illustrate class rage and the impulse to let images diffuse into abstract emotionality.--Helen Holmes "Observer" Vallotton's vision is uniquely strange.... there is almost invariably a narrative puzzle at their heart.--Laura Cumming "Observer"

Dita Amory is curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and author of Madame Cezanne (2014). Philippe Buttner is Keeper of the Collection at the Kunsthaus Zurich. Ann Dumas is curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Patrick McGuinness is a novelist, critic and poet, and Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford. Katia Poletti is Director of the Vallotton Foundation. Christian Rumelin is Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the Cabinet d'arts graphiques du Musee d'art et d'histoire in Geneva. Belinda Thomson is an honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh and an independent art historian.