Le Modèle

Unadorned and distant, Félix Vallotton presents us with an image of a female model, completely dispensing with any mythological or historical décor. The woman is firmly anchored in the present of the contemporary viewer and exposed to his gaze. Her mouth half open, her dress slipped down around her hips, she stands attending to her hair.

The painter, born in Lausanne in 1865, and who spent the majority of his life in France, has not depicted an ideal figure in this work. Instead he presents his model’s flaws with an incisive realism: the eyebrows that meet in the middle, the slight squint, the unclassical body proportions.

In their directness his nudes go against the grain of the academic doctrine of the time. Vallotton, who achieved fame in the 1890s with his woodcuts and was closely associated with the artists’ group Nabis, emphasized the real, ordinary body. The cool clarity of his nudes produced after 1900 already anticipate New Objectivity and the contemporaneous Italian movement Pittura Metafisica of the 1910s and 1920s.