The ten studio portraits of women by Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) now on view at Michael Werner in New York are difficult pictures to like, and that is precisely where their mysterious appeal can be found. Vallotton is justly celebrated for his friezelike portrait (not in the show) of the legendary anarchist and writer Félix Fénéon Editing La Revue Blanche (1896), the journal associated with the Nabi artists Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Édouard Vuillard, an intense image of a man hunched over his manuscripts that today seems to presage the fervor of the solitary blogger.
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