1865-1925was a Swiss painter and printmaker associated with Les Nabis. He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut. He was born into a conservative middle class family in Lausanne, and there he attended College Cantonal, graduating with a degree in classical studies in 1882. In that year he moved to Paris to study art under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Academie Julian. He spent many hours in the Louvre, where he greatly admired the works of Holbein, Derer and Ingres; these artists would remain exemplars for Vallotton throughout his life.[1] His earliest paintings, such as the Ingresque Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbach (1885), are firmly rooted in the academic tradition, and his self portrait of 1885 (seen at right) received an honorable mention at the Salon des artistes français in 1886. During the following decade Vallotton painted, wrote art criticism and made a number of prints. In 1891 he executed his first woodcut, a portrait of Paul Verlaine. The many woodcuts he produced during the 1890s were widely disseminated in periodicals and books in Europe as well as in the United States, and were recognized as radically innovative in printmaking. They established Vallotton as a leader in the revival of true woodcut as an artistic medium; in the western world, the relief print, in the form of commercial wood engraving, had long been mainly utilized unimaginatively as a medium for the reproduction of drawn or painted images and, latterly, photographs. Vallotton's starkly reductive woodcut style features large masses of undifferentiated black and areas of unmodulated white. While emphasizing outline and flat patterns, Vallotton generally made no use of the gradations and modeling traditionally produced by hatching. The influences of post-Impressionism, symbolism and the Japanese woodcut are apparent; a large exhibition of ukiyo-e prints had been presented at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890, and Vallotton, like many artists of his era an enthusiast of Japonism, collected these prints. He depicted street crowds and demonstrations including several scenes of police attacking anarchists bathing women, portrait heads, and other subjects which he treated with a sardonic humor. His graphic art reached its highest development in Intimit's (Intimacies), a series of ten interiors published in 1898 by the Revue Blanche, which deal with tension between men and women. Vallotton's prints have been suggested as a significant influence on the graphic art of Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner .By 1892 he was affiliated with Les Nabis, a group of young artists that included Pierre Bonnard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard, with whom Vallotton was to form a lifelong friendship. During the 1890s, when Vallotton was closely allied with the avant-garde, his paintings reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail.  Related Paintings of Felix Vallotton :. | Woman Searching through a cupboard | Die Ruhepause der Modelle | Felix Jasinski Holding His Hat | Torso with blue cloth | Portrait decoratif of Charles Baudelaire |
Related Artists:
Felix Esterl
(1894 -1931 ) - Painter painted Still life with fruits, foliage plants and jug in
Piet Mondrian
Dutch 1872-1944 Piet Mondrian Location was a Dutch painter. He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the use of the three primary colours. When 47-year-old Piet Mondrian left his artistically conservative native Holland for unfettered Paris for the second and last time in 1919, he set about at once to make his studio a nurturing environment for paintings he had in mind that would increasingly express the principles of Neo-Plasticism about which he had been writing for two years. To hide the studio's structural flaws quickly and inexpensively, he tacked up large rectangular placards, each in a single color or neutral hue. Smaller colored paper squares and rectangles, composed together, accented the walls. Then came an intense period of painting. Then again he addressed the walls, repositioning the colored cutouts, adding to their number, altering the dynamics of color and space, producing new tensions and equilibrium. Before long, he had established a creative schedule in which a period of painting took turns with a period of experimentally regrouping the smaller papers on the walls, a process that directly fed the next period of painting. It was a pattern he followed for the rest of his life, through wartime moves from Paris to London??s Hampstead in 1938 and 1940, across the Atlantic to Manhattan. At 71 in the fall of 1943, Mondrian moved into his second and final New York studio at 15 East 59th Street, and set about again to create the environment he had learned over the years was most congenial to his modest way of life and most stimulating to his art. He painted the high walls the same off-white he used on his easel and on the seats, tables and storage cases he designed and fashioned meticulously from discarded orange and apple-crates. He glossed the top of a white metal stool in the same brilliant primary red he applied to the cardboard sheath he made for the radio-phonograph that spilled forth his beloved jazz from well-traveled records, Visitors to this last studio seldom saw more than one or two new canvases, but found, often to their astonishment, that eight large compositions of colored bits of paper he had tacked and re-tacked to the walls in ever-changing relationships constituted together an environment that, paradoxically and simultaneously, was both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful. It was the best space, Mondrian said, that he had ever inhabited. Tragically, he was there for only a few months: he died of pneumonia in February 1944.
HOLBEIN, Ambrosius
German Northern Renaissance Painter, 1494-ca.1519 Painter, draughtsman and designer of woodcuts, son of Hans Holbein. In the drawing of Ambrosius and Hans Holbein the Younger (1511; Berlin, Kupferstichkab.) by their father, Hans's age is given as 14, and although that of Ambrosius cannot be read clearly, he appears to have been the elder brother. In 1514 he was probably working near the Bodensee, and a Virgin and Child (Basle, Kstmus.), with the coat of arms of Johann von Botzheim, Canon of Konstanz Cathedral (c. 1480-1535), appears to be his work. In 1515 he was working as a journeyman to the painter Thomas Schmid (c. 1480-c. 1550-60) on the decoration of the abbot's Festsaal in the Benedictine St Georgkloster at Stein-am-Rhein, which included allegorical figures of women, one of which, Death with a Female Lute-player (in situ), is signed AH. Also in 1515 he joined his brother Hans in Basle, where together they decorated with marginal drawings (1515-16) the copy of Erasmus's Praise of Folly (Basle, Kstmus.) belonging to the schoolmaster Myconius (Oswald Geissh?sler; d 1552); the distinction between the hands of the two brothers can be made only on stylistic grounds. They also painted a school sign for Myconius, each apparently working on a different side. On 25 July 1516 Ambrosius was recorded staying in the house of the painter Hans Herbst, in whose workshop he may have been employed. On 14 February 1517 he was enrolled in the Basle painters' guild, and on 5 June 1518 he became a citizen of the city. Numerous woodcut designs executed for Basle printers from 1517 onwards and signed with Ambrosius Holbein's initials survive, most of which are set in architectural frameworks inspired by the Italian Renaissance,