Queer Places:
Musée de Montmartre, 12 Rue Cortot, 75018 Paris, France
Cimetière Parisien de Saint-Ouen
Saint-Ouen, Departement de Seine-Saint-Denis, Île-de-France, France
Suzanne
Valadon (23 September 1865 – 7 April 1938) was a French painter and artists'
model who was born Marie-Clémentine Valadon at Bessines-sur-Gartempe,
Haute-Vienne, France. In 1894, Valadon became the first woman painter admitted
to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She was also the mother of painter
Maurice Utrillo. The subjects of her drawings and paintings included mostly
female nudes, female portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. She never
attended the academy and was never confined within a tradition.[1]
Valadon spent nearly 40 years of her life as an artist.[2]
Valadon grew up in poverty with her mother, an unmarried laundress; she did
not know her father. Known to be quite independent and rebellious, she
attended primary school until age 11.
She began working at age 11 in a variety of areas including a milliner's
workshop, a factory making funeral wreaths, a market selling vegetables, a
waitress, and then finally in the circus.[3]
At the age of 15 Valadon met Count Antoine de la Rochefoucauld and Thèo
Wagner, two symbolist painters who were involved in decorating a circus
belonging to Medrano. Through this connection she began work at the Mollier
circus as an acrobat until she fell from a trapeze after a year of work. The
circus was frequented by artists such as Lautrec, Sescau and
Berthe Morisot
and this may be where Morisot did her painting of Valadon.[4]
It is commonly believed that Valadon taught herself how to draw at the age
of nine.[5]
In the Montmartre quarter of Paris, she pursued her interest in art, first
working as a model for artists, observing and learning their techniques,
before becoming a noted painter herself.[6]
Valadon debuted as a model in 1880 in Montmartre at age 15.[7]
She modeled for over 10 years for many different artists including
Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, Théophile Steinlen, Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Jean-Jacques Henner, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.[2]
She modeled under the name "Maria" before being nicknamed "Suzanne" by
Toulouse-Lautrec, after the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders as he
felt that she especially liked modeling for older artists.[8][9]
For two years, she was Toulouse-Lautrec's lover until her attempted suicide in
1888.[10][1]
Valadon helped to educate herself in art by observing the artists at work
for whom she posed.[1]
She was considered a very focused, ambitious, rebellious, determined,
self-confident, and passionate woman.[11]
In the early 1890s, she befriended Edgar Degas who, impressed with her bold
line drawings and fine paintings, purchased her work and encouraged her; she
remained one of his closest friends until his death. Art historian Heather
Dawkins believed that Valadon's experience as a model added depth to her own
images of nude women, which tended to be less idealized than that of the male
post impressionists representations.[12]
The most recognizable image of Valadon would be in Renoir's Dance at
Bougival from 1883, the same year that she posed for Dance in the City.[13]
In 1885, Renoir painted her portrait again as Girl Braiding Her Hair.
Another of his portraits of her in 1885, Suzanne Valadon, is of her
head and shoulders in profile. Valadon frequented the bars and taverns of
Paris with her fellow painters, and she was Toulouse-Lautrec's subject in his
oil painting The Hangover.[14]
Valadon began painting full-time in 1896.[5]
She painted still lifes, portraits, flowers, and landscapes that are noted for
their strong composition and vibrant colors. She was, however, best known for
her candid female nudes that depict women's bodies from a woman's perspective.[15]
Her work attracted attention partly because, as a woman painting unidealized
nudes, she upset the social norms of the time.[16]
Valadon's earliest surviving signed and dated work is a self-portrait from
1883, drawn in charcoal and pastel.[5]
She produced mostly drawings between 1883 and 1893, and began painting in
1892. Her first models were family members, especially her son, mother, and
niece.[17]
Her earliest known female nude was executed in 1892.[18]
In 1895, the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel exhibited a group of twelve etchings
by Valadon that show women in various stages of their toilettes.[5]
Later, she regularly showed at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris.[19]
Valadon's first time in the Salon de la Nationale was in 1894. She also
exhibited in the Salon d'Automne from 1909, Salon des Independants from 1911;
Salon des Femmes Artistes Modernes, 1933-1938.[20]
Degas was notably the first person to buy drawings from her,[21]
and he also introduced her to other collectors, including Paul Durand-Ruel and
Ambroise Vollard. Degas also taught her the skill of soft-ground etching.[22]
In 1896, Valadon became a full-time painter after her marriage to the
well-to-do banker Paul Mousis.[5]
She made a shift from drawing to painting starting in 1909.[23]
Her first large oils for the Salon related to sexual pleasure, and they were
some of the first examples in painting for the man to be an object of desire
by a woman. These notable Salon paintings include Adam and Eve (Adam
et Eve) (1909), Joy of Life (La Joie de vivre) (1911), and
Casting the Net (Lancement du filet) (1914).[24]
In her lifetime time, Valadon produced around 273 drawings, 478 paintings, and
31 etchings, excluding pieces given away or destroyed.[25]
Valadon was well known during her lifetime, especially towards the end of
her career.[26]
Her works are in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the
Museum of Grenoble, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among
others.
Valadon was not confined to a specific style, yet both Symbolist and
Post-Impressionist aesthetics are clearly seen within her work.[27]
She worked primarily with oil paint, oil pencils, pastels, and red chalk; she
did not use ink or watercolor because these mediums were too fluid for her
preference.[28]
Valadon's paintings feature rich colors and bold, open brushwork often
featuring firm black lines to define and outline her figures.[2]
Valadon's self-portraits, portraits, nudes, landscapes, and still lifes
remain detached from trends and aspects of academic art.[29]
The subjects of Valadon's paintings often reinvent the old masters' themes:
women bathing, reclining nudes, and interior scenes. She preferred to paint
working-class models. Art historian Patricia Mathews suggests that Valadon's
working-class status and experience as a model influenced her intimate,
familiar observation of these women's bodies. In this respect she differed
from Berthe Morisot and
Mary Cassatt,
who painted mostly women, but "remained well within the bounds of propriety in
their subject matter" because of their upper-middle-class status in French
society.[26]
Valadon's marginalized status allowed her to enter the male domain of art
through modeling, and her lack of formal academic training may have made her
feel more comfortable breaking with convention.[30]
She has been considered a transgressor as a woman painting the nude female
body.[31]
She resisted typical depictions of women via their class and supposed
sexuality through her use of unidealised and self-possessed bodies that are
not overly sexualised.[32]
She also painted many nude self-portraits across the span of her career, the
later of which displayed her aging body.
Valadon emphasised the importance of composition of her portraits over
painting expressive eyes.[28]
Her later works, such as Blue Room (1923), are brighter in color and
show a new emphasis on decorative backgrounds and patterned materials.[33]
In 1883, aged 18, Valadon gave birth to a son, Maurice Utrillo.[2]
Valadon's mother cared for Maurice while she returned to modelling.[11]
Valadon's friend Miguel Utrillo would later sign papers recognizing Maurice as
his son, although his true paternity is uncertain.[34]
In 1893, Valadon began a short-lived affair with composer Erik Satie,
moving to a room next to his on the
Rue Cortot. Satie became obsessed with her, calling her his
Biqui, writing impassioned notes
about "her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet", but after
six months she left, leaving him devastated.[35]
Valadon married the stockbroker Paul Mousis in 1895, living with him for 13
years in an apartment in Paris and in a house in the outlying region.[28]
In 1909, Valadon began an affair with the painter André Utter, the 23-year-old
friend of her son, divorcing Moussis in 1913.[36]
Valadon married Utter in 1914,[5]
and he managed her career as well as her son's.[37]
Valadon and Utter regularly exhibited work together until the couple divorced
in 1934.[37]
As one of the best documented French artists of the early 20th century,
Valadon's body of work has been of great interest to feminist art historians[38],
especially given her focus on the female form. Her work was candid and
occasionally awkward, often characterized by strong lines, and her resistance
to both academic and avant-garde conventions for representing the female nude
have encouraged interest in her work:
It has been argued that many of her images of women signal a form of
resistance to some of the dominant representations of female sexuality in
early 20th-century Western art. Many of her nudes painted from the 1910s
onwards are heavily proportioned and sometimes awkwardly posed. They are
conspicuously at odds with the svelte, 'feminine' type to be found in the
imagery of both popular and 'high' art.[30]
Suzanne Valadon died of a stroke[39]
on April 7, 1938, at age 72, and was buried in the Cimetière de Saint-Ouen in
Paris. Among those in attendance at her funeral were her friends and
colleagues André Derain, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque.
A novel based on the life of Suzanne Valadon was written by Elaine Todd
Koren and was published in 2001, entitled Suzanne: of Love and Art.[40]
See also Suzanne Valadon. An earlier novel by Sarah Baylis, entitled
Utrillo's Mother, was published first in England and later in the United
States. Timberlake Wertenbaker's play, The Line (2009), traces the
relationship between Valadon and Degas. Valadon was the basis for the
character Suzanne Rouvier in the novel The Razor's Edge by
W. Somerset Maugham.[41]
Both an asteroid (6937 Valadon) and a crater on Venus are named in her
honor.
The small square at the base of the Montmartre funicular in Paris is named
Place Suzanne Valadon. At the top of the funicular, and less than 50 meters to
its east, are the steps named rue Maurice Utrillo after her son the artist.
Musée de Montmartre, established in the building in which Valadon had an
apartment and studio.
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