Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) was a member of the Nabis (the Prophets), a problematically loose agglomeration of painters, inspired by Gauguin and Émile Bernard, the school of Pont-Aven. Broadly speaking, this entailed an alleged allegiance to spirituality and anti-naturalistic flat colour.
The Nabis — a secret group moniker —were heterogeneous, a broad church that seldom sang from the same hymn sheet. As we can see from Vallotton’s inadvertently emblematic ‘The Five Painters’ (1902–3): Vallotton stands to the left and Ker-Xavier Roussel stands to the right. Below, seated, are Bonnard, Vuillard and Charles Cottet. Like many group paintings, it is an identity parade of posed and wooden mugshots. It is formally incoherent. Vallotton has attempted to unify and animate his painting with hand gestures. They overwhelm the picture. Everyone appears to be learning sign language. Or engaged in some mystical game of pass-the-parcel. It is all fingers and thumbs. And not all the hands in this plethora are convincing: Vuillard’s scrum of clasped fingers is enigmatically related to his wrists and Cottet’s left little finger is worryingly skewiff, like Dupuytren’s contracture.
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