Description
With the change of the century, Vallotton shifted his focus from printmaking to oil painting. Before 1900, the artist concentrated on precisely reproducing the world around him, but as seen in this painting, Vallotton’s work shows hints of ambiguity. The greenery blends together, and the distant horizon is described in simple curves of hills or clouds that fade into the sky.
Provenance
(Galerie Jacques-Rodrigues-Henriques [1886-1968], Paris, France) (by 1928); Mme Debrise, Paris, France (1945–?); (Galerie Vallotton, no. 13179, Lausanne, Switzerland) (1988–?); (Sotheby's, Zurich, Switzerland, May 27, 2008, lot 38, sold to Samuel Josefovitz) (May 27, 2008); Samuel Josefovitz [1921-2015], Lausanne, Switzerland, sold to Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley (2008–?); Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley, Cleveland, OH, given to the Cleveland Museum of Art (2020); The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (2020–)
Accession Number
2020.115
Medium
oil on board
Dimensions
Unframed: 26.2 x 46.2 cm (10 5/16 x 18 3/16 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift
Tags
Painting Impressionist & Modern (1851–1900) Oil Painting Board
Background & Context
Background Story
Corn Fields from 1900 is one of Vallotton's most radical landscape paintings, reducing the countryside to flat planes of color that anticipate the abstract landscapes of later 20th-century painting. The cornfields stretch across the picture plane in horizontal bands of green, gold, and blue, with no conventional depth cues and no picturesque details to soften the impact of the composition. The painting's radical simplicity—the elimination of everything that does not contribute to the color structure—makes it one of the most forward-looking landscapes of the early 20th century.
Cultural Impact
Vallotton's Corn Fields is a landmark in the history of landscape painting because it reduces the countryside to its essential color structure, eliminating the conventional depth cues and picturesque details that had defined landscape since Claude Lorrain. The influence of this approach can be traced through the abstract landscapes of Mondrian, the color field paintings of Rothko, and the radial compositions of the late 20th-century landscape tradition.
Why It Matters
Corn Fields is Vallotton's landscape at its most radical: the countryside reduced to horizontal bands of color, with no depth cues and no picturesque details. The painting looks forward to Mondrian's dunes and Rothko's color fields—a landscape that is pure structure, pure color, and pure Vallotton.
