The Red Room

Félix Vallotton painted this red interior in 1898, the year before his own marriage, and made it the first of a series he called Interiors with Figures. A couple stands half-swallowed in a dark doorway at the back while the foreground gives us almost nothing but empty, saturated red. He had spent that same year cutting the woodblocks for a set of prints about secret couples and bourgeois affairs, and this scene of a man and woman withdrawing behind a door carries the same charge of something illicit. The title may nod to a Strindberg novel of the same name, a sour portrait of middle-class hypocrisy. Vallotton himself was weeks from marrying into a prosperous art-dealing family.