Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

THE LUXURY OF LIMITLESS TIME AT VILLA FLORA

Our series on authors and museums continues with Helen Simpson’s choice: Villa Flora, a vine-clad private house near Zurich, where she is reuinited with a lazy, old friend ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2008

When I was a student, I stuck a poster on my wall, an enlarged print of the bold witty woodcut “La Paresse” (above); by Félix Vallotton. This image of laziness spurred me on through essay crises. The naked girl sprawled across a caparisoned bed, reaching down to shake the outstretched paw of a white cat, seemed to promise what life would be like once the deadline had been met.

Félix Vallotton’s name is hardly known outside Switzerland (where he was born in 1865) or France (where he lived from the age of 17 until his death at 60). He was a friend of Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, and, like them, a member of the Nabi group of post-impressionists, but his paintings are much harder to find than theirs. Last year the Kunsthaus in Zurich held a big exhibition of his work, and it was thrilling to see this cache of paintings for the first time. The only disappointment was that none of his woodcuts was there. These, I discovered, are to be found at the Villa Flora in Winterthur, a private house which has become a mini-museum, opening its doors for part of each week.

So I headed back to Zurich and took the 20-minute train ride to Winterthur, a prosperous industrial town much better known for its Reinhart collection of Renoirs than for its link with the man I was after. The Villa Flora is right on the Tösstalstrasse, an ugly main road connecting Winterthur to the cotton factories which are the bedrock of its wealth. Across the way is an old people’s home where residents take tea on the terrace. The villa, vine-clad and Italianate, has an elegant old-fashioned garden with gravel paths, an avenue of rose trees, bronze statues by Maillol of Summer and Pomona, and wood pigeons cooing in the big old beech and lime trees.

The villa was once the home of Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser, a forward-looking young couple who assembled a small but breathtaking art collection, buying directly at modest pre-war rates from artists who were still making their names, Bonnard among them. Vallotton became the Hahnlosers’ lifelong friend and adviser, corresponding from Paris and often staying with them. They bought many of his paintings over the years, and his judgment informed their other purchases, including Van Goghs and Cézannes. He wrote to Hedy: “Whenever I could, I have helped you, brought you my ideas, and made you aware of those artists whom I felt to be mature and secure. You have been so good to me, as generous and trusting as anyone could possibly be, and never have I hidden from anyone how much I owe you.” After his death, she wrote his biography.

Villa Flora has been lived in steadily by several generations of the same family and it is comfortable and spacious but with nothing grand about it, no museum-like froideur. The downstairs salon, panelled with amber-coloured satinwood, was the height of modernity a hundred years ago, when its Jugendstil interior was commissioned by Villa Flora’s new owners. Today, there are still threadbare Turkish rugs on herringbone parquet, window-seats and corner benches with long cushions, an aspidistra and a grand piano. In one homely green-tiled corner stands a tall wood-burning stove.

Here at last I am reunited with the lazy girl on the bed. I am alone in front of it--another lovely thing about this museum is its low profile and consequent paucity of visitors--and I can smile and sigh unselfconsciously. Long ago this woodcut had seemed to promise the luxury of limitless time, which is now almost tangible in the serene unhurried atmosphere of Villa Flora. “La Paresse” is part of a good collection of Vallotton’s fascinating woodcuts. They are kept behind the glass-paned doors of the satinwood cabinets, at Vallotton’s own suggestion.

Their dynamic subjects--a gust of wind on a Paris pavement, a road accident, a bustling draper’s shop, a crowd in flight--are executed with awesome comic bravura and a lethal eye for detail. One series of ten tense theatrical little scenes, “Intimités”, stands out as a set, each vignette showing a man and a woman frozen in some attitude of confrontation, seduction or deadlock. The titles are physically included at the foot of each image, adding to their ominous ambiguity. “L’Argent” shows a man quietly pleading with--or bullying--a woman who stares out of an open window; in “Le Triomphe” (pictured) a man sits weeping into his handkerchief at a table while a woman coldly observes him from the sofa. “La Santé de l’Autre” shows a half-naked woman curled round the man sitting on the edge of her bed while she holds a small glass to his lips: is she giving him a dose of medicine or of poison?

Sardonic and economical, these self-contained dramatic situations remind me of the stories of Guy de Maupassant. In fact Vallotton was a writer manqué, the author of eight plays (six of them unstaged) and three novels unpublished during his lifetime. “La Vie Meurtrière”, illustrated with his own woodcuts, is the story of an artist, Verdier, convinced that it is his fault when the people around him start dying off. It is a troubled savage novel, this first-person story of an artist beginning with V, and it is hard not to read it as revealing some all-or-nothing quality in Vallotton’s own nature, an edge of desperation. In another of the glazed cabinets I find a posthumously published copy lying open at his histrionic image of a corpse--"Hubertin, raide dans sa blouse noire”. His fiction, so prolific and unsuccessful, seems to have been an outlet for all sorts of feelings of hostility and guilt. He began “La Vie Meurtrière” in 1907, the year his former lover, a seamstress called Hélène Chatenay, was fatally run over by a car.

I find myself wondering about the artist as a young man and what it did to him to have grown up in an isolated Protestant Swiss canton and then, at 17, to land in the hedonistic whirl of fin-de-siècle Paris. At first Vallotton lived on the bohemian breadline, for some of these early years with Hélène Chatenay. He painted, and from 1888 took commissions for woodcuts from magazines like La Revue Blanche, Le Rire and Jugend; within a decade he had become famous for them. Then, in 1899, he decided to break with his old life. He married Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, a rich widow with three small children, exchanging his former lodgings on the left bank for family life on the right bank. “I will continue with my work, she with her home,” he wrote to his brother. “It will be a very sensible marriage.”

The father of the bride was a successful art dealer, and Vallotton was now able to afford to turn down commissions for woodcuts and direct his energies towards his painting. Married life was not quite as he had imagined; in 1918 he let off steam in his diary, “The life that I live is literally the opposite of that of which I dreamt. I love seclusion, silence, ripened thoughts, and rational activity--and here I flounder in the goings-on, foolish prattle, and vain fuss.”

Moving from painting to painting, I gradually realise that there is a sense of suppressed violence in nearly everything Vallotton did. In “La Dordogne à Beynac” (1925), trees bulge and loom like muggers. In “Chemin couvert, Honfleur” (1909) and “La Charette” (1911), the entire foreground is menaced with predatory shadows. Even the still lifes are aggressive: “Tulips in a Green Vase” (1913) writhe and swoop, while the tall pointed leaves in a jar of “Hortensias” (1910) look more like knife blades than foliage. These are all the more unnerving for being set in the benign tranquillity of the Villa Flora, in rooms with vases of soft drooping roses.   

Vallotton was drawn to stark contrasts. Many of the paintings here were thrown down like gauntlets, taking satirical oppositions and dualities as their subject matter. Upstairs, in a well-lit gallery room with a frosted glass ceiling which was added by the Hahnlosers as their collection grew, I find myself in front of one of the largest, most arresting examples of this--“La Blanche et la Noire” (1913).

A black woman sits on a bed smoking a cigarette, watching a naked white girl lying in front of her; she is carefully dressed, soignée, her beautiful long-fingered hands crossed on her lap. The white girl is flushed in the face, and her pubic hair is at the centre of the canvas. Her red hair clashes with the rose skin tones and her hands are mauve-pink mitts, the fingers barely sketched in.

Against clichéd Orientalist expectation of the time, and in a bold subversion of Manet’s “Olympia” (which had caused shock waves in 1863), it is the black woman rather than the odalisque who draws the eye. Ash is about to drop from her cigarette. Is this the first ever painting in which a woman is shown smoking? Perhaps she is the madam of a brothel, waiting with bad news for one of her girls to wake. Or perhaps they are lovers, and that is a post-coital cigarette between her lips, a post-orgasmic flush on the girl’s face. The girl’s eyes might be half-open, but if you look closely that might be the edge of the iris, so she could be peering at the black woman from under her lids, holding her gaze. Even so, it is hostility rather than love that crackles between these two.

Vallotton had an apparent disdain for the flesh, to go by the strangely sarcastic, marmoreal nudes in other paintings like “Woman with Parrot” (1909-13) and “Suzanna and the Elders” (1902). He painted them with a deliberate flatness, more emblematic than realistic, and simplified to the point of caricature. He sneered at sex. These paintings make me wince and wonder why. His naked ladies are not idealised, and many of them are depicted so coldly that they are the polar opposite of romantic, quite unlike anything being painted at the time.  These are not nudes to sigh over. Something else is going on.

I pause in front of “The Purple Hat”, which shows a girl in a corset, the straps of her chemise adrift. A feather from her absurd great hat touches her bare shoulder and she is slightly boss-eyed. The catalogue sees this as a come-hither look, but I don’t know. To me, she looks embarrassed, resentful, close to tears; an extreme version of someone who doesn’t enjoy having her photograph taken: “Do I have to?” Sadism lurks in the wings. The striking background colour is surely the poisonous shade described in “La Vie Meurtrière”, where the artist’s boy-assistant is asked to fetch certain toxic ingredients for a gunpowder green, and puts them in his pocket along with his lunchtime roll; he is poisoned, and dies.

As for the purple hat and the white chemise—was Vallotton aware that purple, green and white were the Suffragette colours? Quite possibly. He painted this in 1907, when the British newspaper Votes for Women was selling 40,000 copies a week and women’s suffrage meetings were filling the Albert Hall. “Sometimes”, he wrote in his diary, “it seems that between the sexes, the thoughts are so contradictory and the feelings so opposed, there is no possibility other than that of winner and loser.” This opposition remained a constant theme in his paintings.

Going back through the house towards the garden, I pause in the modest entrance hall to examine Vallotton’s portrait of Hedy Hahnloser, hanging above the reception desk. It is quite unlike any of his other paintings of women that I’ve seen here; he paints her as if she were a man. This is even more striking in Switzerland than it might be elsewhere. Women in Switzerland were not given the vote in national elections until 1971, and at cantonal level not until 1990 in Appenzell Innerrhoden. This remarkable woman, Vallotton’s most fervent champion in his native land, must have taken extra deep breaths of the zeitgeist to triumph as she did over a climate of such intense conservatism.

After art school in Munich, this New Woman married Arthur Hahnloser, an eye doctor, who shared her passion for collecting. Not that the rest of the family did: in 1911, when the couple bought their first Renoir, Hedy’s mother and banker brother visited in formal dress to let them know that if they ran out of money because of this art nonsense, they need not count on any help from them. During the first world war, their Swiss home became a welcome refuge for many of the artist friends they had met in Paris, who would often work there and sometimes leave paintings in return for hospitality. Afterwards, thanks to the arrival of American collectors, prices shot up and Hedy could no longer afford to buy more than the occasional painting. 

On Hedy’s death in 1952 one of her daughters went to live at the Villa Flora and stayed for almost 30 years. Today, it’s the turn of Hedy’s granddaughter Verena, whose decision it was to open to the public in order to keep the private collection together. The display of paintings—which include Bonnards, Matisses, Van Goghs and Cézannes—changes from year to year, as there are too many to hang all at once. The latest exhibition, running till September 2009, is on the theme still life and interiors, and includes a good selection of Vallotton’s work. This is just as it should be, since Félix Vallotton was the tutelary genius of the Villa Flora.

Villa Flora  Tösstalstrasse 44, 8400 Winterthur. www.villaflora.ch

WINTERTHUR:

How to get there

By air: British Airways has direct flights to Zurich from Heathrow, Gatwick and London City, Alitalia from Rome and Air Berlin from Madrid. Zurich is 15 minutes by taxi, and there are regular trains and buses. Winterthur is half an hour from the airport. By train: Zurich is four and a half hours from Paris on the TGV, four hours from Munich and about eight hours from London. Winterthur is 20 minutes from Zurich. Plan your trip at www.bahn.de.

When to go

Winter is particularly picturesque with snow covering the cobbled streets. The museum is open from 2pm to 5pm Tuesday to Saturday and 11am to 3pm Sunday. On Sunday it is included in the Museumbus tour which leaves Winterthur station at 9.45am and hourly thereafter.

Where to stay

Accommodation is in short supply, so stay in downtown Zurich: try the Widder Hotel, pricey but luxurious and unusual (+41 44 224 2526, www.widderhotel.ch, rooms from CHF500/£250), or the more classic Florhof, a charming historic building in the heart of the city (+41 44 250 2626, www.florhof.ch, rooms from CHF180/£90).

Picture credit: Mark Henley (photograph, above right)

(Helen Simpson has written five volumes of short stories. Her last book, "In the Driver's Seat", was published in 2007. Also read Tim de Lisle on why we are celebrating museums and Julian Barnes on a museum in Cefalu, Sicily.)