Felix Vallotton's working-class women in New York

Less is often more. The Michael Werner Gallery has assembled nine mid-period portrait studies by the Franco-Swiss painter Felix Vallotton (1865-1925) in a single room on New York's Upper East Side. All portray models, none particularly beautiful, some frankly plain. Vallotton has dressed some fancifully, and undressed others.

Mostly there's a studio backdrop with a few accoutrements— hangings, or a guitar. A couple of nudes are placed against an equally nondescript exterior, one in shallow water, one posed against a neutrally blue sky.

One can see in all this the various property shops of 19th-Century Romanticism and neoclassicism, thoughtfully arrayed and passing in review. Suspended above each portrait, and all of them together, is a common question: So, how shall we look at a woman? What is it we think we see?

Ordinary but moving

In Jeune Fille, a plain-faced woman in an off-the-shoulder blouse looks up, hopefully but rather indefinitely, her brownish-green eyes set off by a darker green background. She has heavy brows, a snub nose, a small mouth.

Vallotton has fixed her as a photograph might, but with a poignancy that belongs to paint alone. Her very ordinariness moves us, and the nonspecific green background she's set against seems to belong to her in some mysterious way, a projection of some essence.

Renaissance sitters were sometimes depicted this way, for example in Titian; but those figures were invariably noble, whereas Vallotton's is unguardedly working-class, a woman exposed to a proprietary gaze that nonetheless declines to exercise its implicit right of appropriation, that remains reticent.

It is under this gaze— one that both exposes and encloses at the same time— that the sitter has her moment of being. Vallotton hasn't told her how to look, and she lacks sufficient autonomy to decide on her own how she will look. She's relaxed into a kind of musing in the absence of any other instruction, and it's here that Vallotton has seized her.

Awaiting a lover?

Pensive, too, perhaps a little brooding, is Femme brune assise de face, avec guitare. A woman sits with her face cupped in her right hand, a yellow score dangling from her left. She's not a musician, one thinks, despite the music and the guitar hanging nearby, but perhaps a woman waiting for a lover— guitars and female sexuality are never more than a metaphor away. She too is bare-shouldered, with the strap of her chemise hanging off her left shoulder.

Shall we assume a narrative here? If we like. But, once again, Vallotton has caught his subject in a time warp, with no before or after but only the still, intense focus of a present moment.

In some of the canvases, the model looks at the viewer more boldly, even provocatively, with wares seemingly on offer. Le châle blanc presents a grinning, toothsome woman in a white flowered robe with a spread fan, looking over her shoulder under black brows. In Femme a l'éventail, the subject holds a fan coyly up to her face, leaving only her eyes exposed. The same temporal wall separates us from these figures as the rest.

Candidly exposed

The subject of Femme tenant sa chemise is candidly exposed; her face, more attractive than those of her sisters, is frank and intelligent rather than inviting: Make of me what you will. Her left breast is crooked tenderly against her arm; her draped knee is raised, concealing her sex; her eyes are not quite levelly placed, one of the small distortions one notices in Vallotton.

Whether covered, in déshabille, or fully nude, Vallotton's women proffer and withhold at the same time, emphasizing the mystery in the ordinary. Part of this effect lies in a disarmingly flat palette that reveals its subtleties only on closer inspection— rather like the painter's subjects themselves, availably working-class at first glance, but elusive as one approaches them— and part of it in the off-kilter references to pictorial tradition.

Classical but comical

In Le Printemps, a three-quarter-length nude holds a diaphanous scarf in a stylized classical pose, her head upturned against a blue studio sky. Her body, though shadowed, is taut and firm, and her hair, though a bit ropy-looking, is abundant. She looks upward in the approved manner.

Her features, though, are entirely plain, even a bit comically so. She carries off her pose and subverts it— that is, the classical tradition itself— at one and the same time. Somewhere between homage and sendup, Le Printemps makes the point, as do all these studies, that we see Woman (or, for that matter, anything else) only through the scrim of convention.

In Vallotton's case, the allusions include Corot, early Degas, Manet and Seurat, each of whom, of course, had his own take on the classical style. Vallotton himself began as a member of the Nabis, an avant-garde group that included Bonnard and Vuillard, the latter a very close friend.

When outmoded styles return

By the time of the nine studies in the present show— the earliest dates from 1905, the latest from 1915— the art world was being revolutionized by Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism and Abstraction. Vallotton would certainly have been abreast of these developments, but there is no sign of them here, except for the planar distortions in Baigneuse Presque de dos. Yet in his way he is as fully contemporary as Matisse or Picasso.

Certain artists doggedly work in an "outmoded" style that, like all else, becomes current again in the fullness of time. Mid- and late-period Vallotton is an indispensable step to Balthus, in whom the French representational tradition was to revive. In the concordia discors of the arts, every genuine talent has its place. In this small but fine show, Felix Vallotton stakes a piece of his.