Model for Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Art history remembers her first and foremost as a model, who posed during several years for illustrious painters like Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The latter reportedly advised her to change her first name.

Maurice Utrillo

Degas called her “The Terrible Maria.” But this laundress’s daughter with a mischievous reputation would be known to posterity as Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938). She had dreamed of becoming an acrobat but ultimately came into her own as a painter. This single mother then gave birth to another painter, whose output was as inconsistent as his temperament: Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955).

Free spirit

Suzanne Valadon

Suzanne, a free-spirited, rebel woman, is now being regaled in Paris with a retrospective comprising over 200 works, on view through May 26 at the Centre Pompidou, which houses the world’s largest collection of her work. This retrospective follows the 2023 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, which featured fewer paintings and contextualized her work alongside that of her contemporaries.

Brutally honest

Suzanne Valadon

In the Paris exhibit, we can now better appreciate her wonderful singularity. One should not come to Valadon seeking technical virtuosity or a wish to create beautiful things. Her representations are brutally honest. Her numerous fleshy silhouettes are traced in black.

Raw colors

Suzanne Valadon

Her palette meanwhile is sharp: her colors often raw and contrasting, her bodies rendered in green and pink, her cheeks bright red. Take for instance her 1920 painting “Gilberte se coiffant” (“Gilberte Combing Her Hair”), which portrays her niece.

Raw realism

Her nudes met with acclaim starting in the 1920s, even among Paris’s political elite. From her beloved Montmartre, where she lived her entire adult life, this audacious artist assiduously observed all the artistic upheavals of her time. However, Valadon never made the leap into abstraction or Cubism. Between the late 1880s, when Degas noticed the merit of her drawings, and her death before the Second World War, she established instead a kind of raw realism.

Reminiscent of the Douanier Rousseau

Suzanne Valadon

Valadon, who taught herself by observing painters around her, from Cézanne to Toulouse-Lautrec, developed a gauche, naive style reminiscent of the Douanier Rousseau. A celebration of awkwardness, with small heads and stiff poses…

Chiara Parisi

“Art history needs to reclaim her,” declares Chiara Parisi, co-curator of the exhibition. “Her work reveals an unusual sincerity. She doesn’t depict perfect bodies, and she dared to portray a naked man, a first. Her ‘Adam and Eve’ is a manifesto in a painting.” In 1909, taking inspiration from the German Renaissance painter Cranach, she painted herself and her partner—his form fully exposed—in the Garden of Eden.

Fig leaf

Suzanne Valadon

Later, a fig leaf would be added to the male figure. Meanwhile it is she who holds the apple, embracing this Adam of Montmartre. For centuries, men had painted their women in the nude. The time had come for women to return the favor.

Aging woman

Suzanne Valadon

Behold her bare-breasted self-portrait from 1931. She painted it at the age of 66. It showcases her unvarnished truth—a naturally aging woman.

Alice Neel

She bears a certain resemblance to a celebrated Contemporary American portraitist who had a retrospective recently at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, at the Centre Pompidou and at the Guggenheim in Bilbao: Alice Neel (1900-1984) (See the report about the show here). Neel painted herself nude and unadorned at the age of 80. The same gall.

Suzanne Valadon

Through May 26. www.centrepompidou.fr/en/