Félix Vallotton L’anarchiste, (the anarchist) 1892 Original Woodcut

Félix Vallotton
L’anarchiste, 1892
Woodcut
cm 17,7 x 25
signed lower left.
Bibliography: M. Vallotton, C. Goerg, Catalogue Raisonné de l’Ouvre Gravé et Litographie, Genève 1972.

For a single decade at the end of the 19th-century Félix Vallotton enjoyed fame above all else as a print maker. Vallotton’s boldly reductive approach to the woodcut is credited by many art historians of his time (and ours) as having modernized and revitalised the form in Western art.

Like many European artists of the late 19th Century, Vallotton was deeply enamoured with the reduced palette and suggestive forms of Japanese woodcuts. His artfully naive compositions from the period demonstrate the extent to which popular Ukiyo-e prints exerted an influence on his painting. In 1891, Vallotton began to experiment with the medium directly, producing an interpretive woodcut of Paul Verlaine that represented a clear break with the established practices of European printmaking.