Cancellation sheet, fragments of ten woodblocks from Intimacies
Medium
Woodcut (ten separate blocks) in black on cream wove paper
Dimensions
Image: 18.8 × 22.8 cm (7 7/16 × 9 in.); Sheet: 24.8 × 32.5 cm (9 13/16 × 12 13/16 in.)
Classification
woodcut
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
62168
Art Historical Context
Félix Vallotton, a Swiss-born artist active in fin-de-siècle Paris and key figure in the Nabis group, created this intriguing *Cancellation sheet, fragments of ten woodblocks Intimacies* in 1898. Printed in stark black ink on cream wove paper, these woodcut fragments (measuring about 18.8 × 22.8 cm) represent the artist's meticulous craftsmanship. Vallotton's woodcuts revived the medium with Japanese ukiyo-e influences, favoring bold contrasts, simplified forms, and precise lines carved directly into the wood blocks—techniques that lent his prints a modern, graphic intensity. The *Intimacies*...
About the Artist
Félix Edouard Vallotton · 1865–1925
Félix Edouard Vallotton (1865–1925) was a Swiss-French painter and printmaker whose deceptively spare imagery concealed a penetrating psychological acuity and a gift for formal invention. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, he moved to Paris at the age of seventeen to study at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, quickly immersing himself in the city's vital avant-garde scene. By the 1890s he had beco...