Félix Vallotton's Murderous Life

Abstract

In 1907 the Franco-Swiss artist Félix Vallotton wrote La vie meurtrière (The Murderous Life), a mock-autobiographical novel with striking tropological connections to his fin-de-siècle prints. An examination of those connections reveals that Vallotton developed a unique visual language in both image and text for the relation between sight and social responsibility. The Paris crowd scenes that first established his artistic reputation attest to the largely unrecognized significance of the gawker (le badaud) as a modern type, a figure for the attractions and fraught ethics of urban spectatorship that is distinct from the far more studied flâneur.