Félix Edouard Vallotton
1865 – 1925
La Paresse (Laziness)
Dimensions: 25.08 cm x 32.54 cm
Medium: color woodcut on paper
Date Created: 1896
Vallotton was a French/Swiss artist known for depicting the mingled cynicism and luxuriance of end-of-century (fin-de-siècle) Paris. He was personally and artistically close with the somewhat radical Les Nabis, a cultish group of young Parisian artists associated with the transition into abstraction and expressionism. La Paresse, a Japanese-inspired woodcut print, shows the idle, almost faceless body of a nude woman who seems to be presented to the viewer as if for their pleasure. Her supple, detail-less body lies in a timeless void and against angular, ornate bedding fabric that accentuates her curves and invites attention. The fabric she lays on looks to have more life and detail than she, and in its complexity highlights her largely nonexistent or simplified (and therefore non-threatening) identity and sexuality as a woman. To render the fabric, the artist mingles Japonisme, a Japanese-influenced but essentially Europeanized art form (characterized by flatness and strong slanting lines) along with a dash of the indulgent passivity of orientalism. The woman toys halfheartedly with an equally undefined and compliant cat (often a symbol of female sexuality) that is backdropped by the same decadent bedding fabric.The effect is a curiously objectifying mixture of Japanese and East-Asian aesthetics sifted through a voyeuristic lens and ready made for the male European gaze.
