06/01/2026
Study of Buttocks — Félix Vallotton, c. 1884
In Study of Buttocks, Félix Vallotton confronts the academic tradition at its most reduced and most charged. Executed early in his career, this work belongs to the discipline of life study: the human body isolated, cropped, and stripped of narrative, identity, or moral framing. Yet even at this stage, Vallotton’s gaze is anything but neutral.
The composition is radical in its proximity. By denying the viewer a face, a setting, or even a complete figure, Vallotton forces attention onto mass, weight, and surface. Flesh becomes landscape — a terrain of subtle tonal shifts, compressed volumes, and quiet tensions. The cool, muted palette resists erotic spectacle; instead, it insists on observation. This is not an idealised n**e but a body seen up close, unprotected, undeniably present.
What makes the study remarkable is its ambiguity. It oscillates between academic exercise and quiet provocation. In an era when the n**e was expected to flatter or allegorise, Vallotton’s framing feels almost confrontational, anticipating the blunt realism and psychological distance that would later define his mature work.
Here, the body is neither myth nor desire. It is matter. And in that refusal to soften or explain, Vallotton already signals a modern sensibility — one that understands looking as an act charged with power, restraint, and unease.