| Louis
Valtat, French Fauvist (1869 - 1952)
After studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Académie
Julian, Louis Valtat exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants
in 1893 and 1894. The following year he worked with Toulouse-Lautrec
on the decoration of an exotic stage set for a performance of
a play at the Théatre de l’Oeuvre in Paris. Throughout
his career, in fact, Valtat worked with, and was inspired by,
several artists, including Aristide Maillol, Auguste Renoir and
Paul Signac. Around 1900 Valtat began to enjoy the patronage of
the avant-garde dealer Ambroise Vollard, who purchased most of
the artist’s work until the outbreak of the first World
War. He also began to divide his time between Paris and a house
in the South of France, near Le Lavandou, although he continued
to travel extensively. Valtat exhibited widely, not only at the
Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne but
also at Le Libre Esthétique in Brussels in 1900. In 1905
he exhibited a seascape at the Salon d’Automne, where it
was shown alongside the work of the painters who came be known
as the Fauves. Although his paintings of this period are sometimes
grouped with those of the Fauves, with whom he shared an interest
in bright colour schemes, Valtat was never as radical in his manipulation
of colour and line as they were. His later years found him concentrating
on still life paintings and floral scenes, as well as landscapes;
works which, while perhaps not as avant-garde as the work of some
of his contemporaries, earned the artist a modest degree of success.
As one modern scholar has written, ‘Valtat was, in his own
way, an intimiste, not only when he painted interiors or flowers
or still lifes in his warm tones, but also when he turned his
joie de vivre to the landscapes that indicated his constant preoccupation
with the representation of nature as he saw it, bathed in peace
and sunlight. His canvases, suffused with light like that of a
golden summer’s day, can hardly contain the full explosion
of his physical and mental well-being.’
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