Laziness
Medium
Woodcut printed in black on ivory wove paper
Dimensions
Image: 17.8 × 22.2 cm (7 × 8 3/4 in.); Sheet: 25.3 × 32.6 cm (10 × 12 7/8 in.)
Classification
woodcut
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
60694
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
In his lifetime Félix Vallotton was perhaps best known for his elegant woodcuts, which he designed, carved, and used to print inventive compositions of both exterior and interior Parisian life. The woodcut, the oldest printmaking technique in Europe, fell out of favor as an artistic practice by the mid-19th century. However, Vallotton revived the method, welcoming the woodcut’s potential to create pure, simplified forms using contrasts of only black and white to suggest pattern, depth, and shape...
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...