Has Julian Barnes found a new vocation? The writer is “in the early stages” of co-organising a Félix Vallotton exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, the Guardian reports. The show, which is due to open in 2019, will present around 70 works by the Swiss-French painter—a contemporary of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard—for the first time in the UK. While a novice curator, Barnes has a critical eye when it comes to art—especially Vallotton’s. “He is a painter who, more than any other I can think of, ranges from high quality to true awfulness,” Barnes wrote in a 2007 essay in the Guardian. Vallotton was a “fine portraitist”, an “extraordinary landscapist” and an “accomplished painter of still-lifes—formidably good at red peppers”, according to Barnes, but his nudes are less likely to make the cut at the RA. The essay muses on “what might be called Vallotton’s law: that the fewer clothes a woman has on in his paintings, the worse the result”.
