Curators introduction: Félix Vallotton
Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet
Friday 5 July 2019 11am - 12pm
The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts
£10, £6
Félix Vallotton
Curator Ann Dumas offers an insight into the critical thinking and curation of our exhibition, 'Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet', presenting a chronological survey of the artist's career.
Although born in Lausanne, Switzerland, from the age of sixteen Félix Vallotton made Paris his home. He lived through a particularly turbulent and vibrant era in the city, at the turn of the 20th century. Curator Ann Dumas discusses Vallotton’s career as she outlines Vallotton’s early years in Paris and his extraordinary gift as a satirical printmaker. Dumas will go on to show how the artist was influenced by the work of other artists in the Nabi group, Bonnard and Vuillard, as well as Japanese ukiyo-e prints. She will also explore the hard-edged realism that is represented in Vallotton’s nudes, still-lifes and landscapes, which shaped the remainder of the artist’s career.
Ann Dumas has been a curator at the RA since 1998. She studied at the Courtauld and specialises in 19th and early 20th-century French art. In the 1980s she was a Hilla von Rebay Research Fellow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, followed by two years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and six years as a curator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
She has been responsible for many major international exhibitions, such as: The Private Collection of Edgar Degas (National Gallery, London and Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1997), Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde (Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2006-2007) and Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2016).