The first question that arises in almost everyone’s mind is why there were no great women artists. Personally, I feel that it is because of cultural neglect through generations. How? Take a look at most art survey books or historical accounts that deal with specific periods of art; they didn’t even acknowledge several women artists. I think this illustrates the problem nicely. Many feminist writers argue that women were not given many commissions or were bound by social restrictions because of gender issues, but the truth is- there were differences, indeed, but only when it came to education, as women artists, who painted well, enjoyed greater patronage than some male artists. In the late seventeenth century, the accounts of women artists were compared with the heroines of antiquity, such as Helena or Calypso. That’s why I feel that it is significant to study women artists to know the entire art world in detail. One striking and consistent fact that emerges as we study some of the earliest known women artists from the Renaissance is that they were able to become artists only because of the availability of their own father’s studios and training. However, note that there were exceptions in this case, like Sofonisba Anguissola, Judith Leyster, and Mary Beale. Then, in the Age of Enlightenment, as the social position of women improved and as academies started including them, their talent and inclination increased. But even till the nineteenth century, in some regions, it remained difficult for a woman to pursue artistry unless they belonged to wealthy families. There are two women who stand out as great examples of situations contrary to this, where they didn’t belong to a rich family but still became great artists: Edmonia Lewis and Suzanne Valadon. Our article today is devoted to revealing the life and artworks of Suzanne. So, let’s start!
Suzanne Valadon | Fast Knowledge
Suzanne Valadon, born Marie-Clementine Valadon, was a 19th-century French painter, active till 1938, who started her career as an artist’s model for prominent painters like Renoir and Toulouse Lautrec. Known for her bold portraitures, linear drawings, and expressions of solitude, she was also the first woman artist member of Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.
Artist Abstract: Suzanne Valadon.
Born as Marie-Clementine Valadon in the Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute Vienne, on 23 September 1865, she was the illegitimate daughter of a sewing maid, who grew up in the Montmartre, Paris. Suzanne Valadon began working as an artist’s model in c. 1880. However, her modeling career was soon interrupted by the birth of her son in 1883, Miquel Utrillo. It was only in 1891 that the Spanish journalist, Miquel Utrillo y Molins, claimed to be his father. She had numerous affairs, including with the composer Erik Satie, in 1893, but she ultimately married a well-flourished clerk, Paul Mousis, in 1896. Suzanne lived for around thirteen years in this marriage, but she soon separated as she fell in love with painter Andre Utter. Hence, she married him in 1914, after living with him from 1909 onwards. After marriage, she bought a chateau at Saint-Bernard in the Saone Valley in 1923. Exceeding in her career, she exhibited at Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1894, Salon d’Automne from 1909; Salon des Indépendants from 1911; Salon des Femmes Artistes Modernes in 1933-8, Societaire, and Salon d’Automne in 1920.
| Artist | Suzanne Valadon |
| Birth | 23 September 1865 |
| Death | 7 April 1938 |
| Nationality | French |
| Genre | Children painting, Nude, etc. |
| Period | Post Impressionism, Modernism |
| Famous Paintings | Self Portrait With Bare Breasts |
Life of the Artist.
“My work… is finished, and the only satisfaction I gain from it is that I have never surrendered. I have never betrayed anything that I believed in.”
These words are from Suzanne Valadon to Francis Carco from 1937.
Starting her career as a model for the nude by Renoir and slattern by Toulouse Lautrec, Suzanne eventually chose to become an artist herself. Philippe Jullian wrote in his book Montmartre, ‘No one has ever washed her dirty linen in public so spectacularly’ for Valadon. Indeed, the disparaging tone used to describe the artist as slut, clouded the judgment of her character from the 1920s to 1990s. In 1996, an art expert in Paris remarked Suzanne was ‘an excellent instinctive artist and a bit of a prostitute.’ It is not wrong to say that for more than seventy years, she scandalized French society by being involved with different lovers, neglecting her illegitimate son long enough that he became a roaring drunk, becoming an old man’s darling in her youth, and young man’s dream at her fifties. Hence, she was seen as a whore and a heroine, but her admirers saw her as a queen. Valadon, as a girl of fifteen, began posing as a model in the streets of Montmartre, and after turning sixty-six, she painted herself with bare breasts.
The paintings of Suzanne Valadon are really powerful and suggest a forceful personality at work. If you look at the nude paintings by the artist, they are compelling and sinuous, depicting a force in them. These paintings literally aroused the antagonism of critics by breaking the centuries of tradition. In the later section, we will see some of her finest paintings, which are erotic but idealized images of naked women. Valadon depicted casual and ordinary women without clothes as awkward and scrawny adolescents, reflecting the imperfections of the flesh. Moving through Impressionists, Cubists, Fauves, and Surrealists, Suzanne Valadon absorbed influences from her contemporaries.
The catalog of the first major Valadon exhibition for thirty years, in 1996, contains two different accounts of her infancy. Yet the register of births at Bessines-sur-Gartempe, a small town twenty miles north of Limoges in central France, records the undisputed facts of her origins. It says,
“In the year eighteen hundred and sixty-five, on the twenty-third of September at four o’clock in the evening, we, Pierre Paul Emile Dumonteil, Mayor acting as Registrar in the commune of Bessines, the chief town of the canton, arrondissement of bellac in the department of Haute-Vienne, received the visit of Francois Peignaud, blacksmith, aged thirty-eight, residing in the town of Bessines, who presented to us a child of the female sex, born that same day at six o’clock in the morning in the house of Madame Guimbaud, widow, to Madeleine Valadon, sewing maid, aged thirty-four, and to an unknown father.. and to whom he stated he wished to give the first name Marie Clementine. The foregoing declaration and presentation of the child were witnessed by the innkeeper, Clement Dony, aged forty-four, and another blacksmith, Armand Chazeaud, and were signed by all present.”
Suzanne Valadon gave herself a professional name early in her career and also altered her birth from 1865 to 67. The inn where she was born, the Auberge Guimbaud, still stands today. In her native town, Marie Clementine’s existence was disgraced when she was just a child, so in the future, she never returns to her native town. Her mother, Madeleine Valadon, was thirty-four when Suzanne was born. Madeleine was married to Leger Coulaud, a blacksmith, mechanic, and locksmith, who was sentenced to hard labor for life because of the forty-franc gold coin he had. During that time, forty-franc was a large amount of money, which led to the arrest of the blacksmith Leger. After two years, he died in prison in 1859, and Madeleine was left with the six-year-old daughter (not Suzanne) to support. However, Madeleine was still fetchingly pretty and had a string of admirers among locals and visitors and was not even thirty. Despite the warnings from the widow Guimbaud and her helper, Madeleine fell pregnant with Suzanne, and to this day, her father is unknown. Madam Guimbaud helped her throughout her pregnancy. However, there was nobody who would care for little Suzanne, as her mother had to work for a living. She never knew about her father, which led her to believe women are the strong and dominant sex, whereas men are the weaker and less predictable sex. We see these beliefs in her later paintings, which showed an unconventional view of the role of the sexes. Her mother, Madeleine, showed independence after her husband died, but after the birth of Suzanne, she grew moody and depressed. In her later life, she was just fond of the bottle. The only satisfaction she had was that Suzanne was well-fed with her relatives. We do not know about the life of her first daughter, Marie Alix.
Her small size led to her being left with her tenement concierge, and later to being enrolled temporarily in kindergarten classes at St. Vincent de Paul Convent. However, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 disrupted all routines, and the six-year-old Suzanne Valadon roamed Montmartre streets at will. Little Suzanne would watch all kinds of artists at work, and in her solitude, she would sketch and draw. But whatever she painted, nothing was taken seriously by her hardworking mother, who just lived to pay bills. When she reached the age of nine, Suzanne got into an apprenticeship as a dressmaker in the factory. But she left it for a series of jobs like being a waitress, dishwasher, and vegetable vendor in Les Halles due to pathetic working conditions. Finally, at sixteen, she joined a circus and performed there, but an accident abruptly ended her career only after seven months. Blue eyes, blonde hair, and supple body, Suzanne had a charming attraction, that caught the attention of several artists. This was why she was hired as a model by famous painters like Puvis de Chavannes, Renoir, and Toulouse-Lautrec. But in the spring of 1883, she was infatuated with Miguel Utrillo, giving birth to Maurice in December. As a result, Suzanne’s career was halted once again due to pregnancy and childbirth at eighteen.
In 1887, Toulouse Lautrec took a studio at the same place where Suzanne resided with her son and mother, and soon she was modeling again. When Lautrec discovered that Valadon possessed a superb talent for drawing, he insisted she meet Degas, who had a great artistic judgment. Degas not only met her or praised her artwork but even arranged for her work to be exhibited in several Parisian galleries. This very thing was the turning point of her career.
As she moved forward professionally, she made some personal changes as well and acquired a new lover, banker Paul Mousis. Enchanted by her beauty and talent, Mousis built a new mansion for her in a respectable section of Paris and asked her to live with him. Upon moving in with him, her son had begun drinking and had been sent to a sanatorium for alcohol treatment. When Maurice returned home after his treatment, he lived with his mom where she taught him to paint. In no time at all, Maurice was copying Montmartre scenes and living alone in his mother’s studio on Rue Cortot. It was then that he met his first real friend, the painter Andre Utter. Paul Mousis was an enigmatic and worthy philistine who had a good circle, and his name extended certain respect. After numerous timid affairs, Suzanne finally wanted to marry someone novel and mature, Mousis. Under his protection, the artist could afford to give up modeling and create artwork without worrying much about finances. By 1894, she grew confident to draw magnificently, and with the active support of Degas and Bartholome, she made an audacious bid to win approval from great artists. In the exhibition to the Salon, they helped Suzanne, and against all the odds, the Salon accepted five of her candid drawings- The Grandson’s Toilet, Grandmother and Grandson, and three other studies of children. In the same exhibition, even Berthe Morisot displayed her art series alongside many other women artists. But what Suzanne achieved with this exhibition no trained or even well-to-do woman artist did. In 1894, Suzanne was the only untrained and unaffiliated artist to exhibit at the Societe Nationale. It itself says that professionally, Suzanne was blooming. On 5 August 1896, Suzanne married Paul Mousis after her long affair with him. Amusingly, the artist’s mother and son were not very happy with the relationship as they literally thought that Mousis would snatch her from them. So, after some thirteen years, Valadon left Mousis and returned to her Montmartre studio, weary of the bourgeois banking circle.
Soon, the artist had a new lover, and there can be no question about it- the restless, flamboyant Suzanne Valadon and the young Andre fell in love despite the twenty-one-year age gap between them. During this time, Suzanne did nude paintings more than ever. And after a while, Suzanne, at forty-nine, married the twenty-eight-year-old Andre. After five years of their productiveness and happiness, the outbreak of World War I interrupted. However, despite all the problems, in 1915, Suzanne had her first solo exhibition at the Berthe Weill Gallery. The Bernheim Jeune Gallery mounted a show of the wicked trinity in 1917, featuring Valadon, Utrillo, and Utter. The signing of the Armistice boosted the art market, and these artists received many more exhibitions. Valadon and Utrillo’s works were particularly popular, commanding reasonable prices. As a result of their new source of income, Valadon and Utter explored the countryside surrounding Lyons and purchased the Chateau St. Bernard. It was here that she painted her still lifes and landscapes over the next decade and when she had plenty of work ready for the Women and Flowers Exhibition in 1929, the Trillo and Utter exhibition in Geneva, and her one-woman exhibition at the Galeries Georges Petit. In brief words, Suzanne enjoyed huge success in her art career. In April 1938, as she reached her seventy-third birthday, Suzanne was working in her Montmartre studio, painting a bowl of flowers, when she took her last breath. Died of a stroke, and her own words served as a eulogy,
“Painting for me is inseparable from life. I put to work the same tenacity that I put, less vigorously, to living, and I have seen all painters, who are committed to their metier, proceed with the same application.”
Briefly Analyzing & Learning Suzanne Valadon Art.
The artist’s illustrations glorify sturdy colors, dramatic contrasts, and sensuous subjects.
“One should never put suffering in drawings, but all the same one has nothing without pain. Art is here to eternalize this life that we hate.”
Suzanne Valadon hoped she would avoid these sufferings in her art, but they were not successfully erased. Her drawings of girls and boys with a pensive and clumsy look ended up depicting the loneliness of the subject. Before we know more about the paintings, let me tell you that all the works before 1883 of Suzanne were mercilessly destroyed.
In the painting, Nude Girl at Her Toilette, she defined the subject’s contours through a pure single and uninterrupted line. To obtain this kind of continuity in the line, she sometimes used tracing. It is important to note that from 1895 to 1920, Suzanne showed nude children bathing in or out of the door, sometimes next to an adult woman.
The artwork, Marie Coca and Gilberte, is a group portrait of Valadon’s maternal niece and grandniece. As you look at the background, the artist places a picture of a group of ballerinas. Now, one point to consider here is that Suzanne never used the technique of “picture within a picture,” but it was used by Degas, who helped Suzanne a lot in her career, as we know from the previous section. And this illustration was a tribute to him for his immense support. There is a significant breathing space in it with adequate space for the sitters. The flower-covered fabric confining to the small area is a sophisticated touch to the artwork, showcasing a rhythmic pattern and broad compositional movement. There is a more subtle effect, unity in the style with a psychological mood.
Suzanne only painted two representations of infants or babies in her entire life. It might be because of her indifferences to the images of motherhood, she saw while she was young. The first one is Maternity (which I can’t find on the internet), and the other one is Maurice Utrillo at the Age of Two, 1886. The latter shows a portrait of Maurice at the age of two, but he looks older than his age. In his portrait, there is a softness and tenderness of her unsuspected vulnerability as a mother instead of a bluntness of line and decisiveness of contour, which she portrayed in her earlier art to portray brittleness. In addition to this, there is the usage of blurry lines, depicting the impression of fragile delicacy. When Maurice reached the age of seven, Suzanne drew him extensively. Paintings like Nude Utrillo Playing With a Bowl, Maurice Utrillo Playing With a Sling Shot, and Utrillo at the Age of Nine show the simplicity of his childhood while being in solace. In Nude Utrillo Playing With a Bowl, Suzanne shows Maurice leaning on a table with one of his feet inside a wash bowl, barely holding his foot. It doesn’t represent a bathing scene but portrays Maurice absorbing in an attempt to roll the empty bowl around in a self-devised game, made by him to remove his boredom. These illustrations do not depict sexuality as they are unconcerned by the nudity and oblivious to the eyes that observe them.
One of the balanced images, which characterizes traditional balance and harmony is Self-Portrait of Suzanne. A simple, broad form outlined in dark blue emphasizes the importance of linear drawing in this work, representing conventionalism found in academic painting. There is an even distribution of color and a smooth graduation of intensity. It depicts Valadon in a three-quarter profile, set against a mottled blue-green background that is reminiscent of David’s early portraits from the 1790s. Combining variations of blue, green, and yellow-brown colors harmoniously, this illustration shows an extraordinary technical and psychological achievement.
In another painting, Portrait of Eric Satie, Suzanne portrays the musician, whom she met at the Auberge du Clou, a boisterous and inexpensive nightclub. The painting is a small work with its height twice its length, giving it monumentality for such dimensions. The oil painting accentuates the sitter’s elongated appearance. The abrupt cropping, which amputated his arms with his tall hat, extends the verticality of the image. The focus of the work remained on the head of the musician with a dark hat. With a decisive and stubbornly fixed glance with sensuous red lips and an unconventional waxed mustache, Satie had a youthfulness in his face.
In The Future Unveiled, a milky-white female body reclines horizontally across the canvas space in a representation of the traditional odalisque theme. Similar to this painting, Suzanne used several unconnected poses, based on the art-historical precedents, for her female protagonists in her other work, Joy of Life, who are observed by a nude male spectator. There is a strange separation between the female figures, the male viewer, and the natural environment. Contrary to the utopian harmony of Matisse and Gauguin, Valadon’s robust, sharply outlined women suggest a more ambiguous, dislocated relationship between nature and the viewer. In The Future Unveiled, the card player holds up the queen of diamonds, foretelling the future, combining odalisque painting conventions with allegory. Patricia Mathews has argued that the,
“symbolism of the queen of diamonds held in the hand of the fortune-teller directly related the allegory to the reading of the odalisque as a sexualized body. The card connecting the two women’s bodies is a sign of the feminine principle, of physicality and the senses, and of money matters. In conjunction with the four kings in the circular arrangement of cards, it evokes a prostitute or courtesan.”
Other artworks of Suzanne include- Adam and Eve, Nude With Striped Coverlet, and Reclining Nude of 1928.
Final Words.
Suzanne’s artworks show an unconventional imagery of the feminine side. I find the artwork more approachable as a viewer and open in terms of feminine sexuality. To me, Suzanne Valadon created a framework of art, which shaped the history of Modernism. To explain her position in the art world, she is the 20th-century avant-garde!
Resources.
- Dictionary of Women Artists Volume 2 by Delia Gaze.
- Our Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists by Eleanor Tufts.
- Suzanne Valadon by Therese Diamand Rosinsky.
- Suzanne Valadon by June Rose and Suzanne Valadon.
- Featured Image: The Blue Room by Suzanne Valadon; Suzanne Valadon, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Frequently Asked Questions.
Suzanne Valadon, the French Post-Impressionist and Modernist, was praised for her nude art forms using bold and uninterrupted lines with the capacity to evoke emotions. Her artworks depict her dominant attitude toward men and center the openness of feminine sexuality. Additionally, the artist was known for her scandalous life, a topic of praise for her followers and criticism from art critics.
The artist changed her name from Marie Clementine to Suzanne Valadon for professional reasons.
Maurice Utrillo was Suzanne Valadon’s only child and son. Suzanne gave birth to Maurice at 18, when she was entertaining a fruitful career as an art model for famous artists like Puvis de Chavannes, Renoir, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Maurice Utrillo, unlike her mother, received her training in the school of Paris and had expertise in painting Cityescapes.
Suzanne Valadon died of a heart stroke on 7 April 1938 as she was painting a bowl of flowers in her Montmartre studio. The artist was then buried in Division 13 of Cimetière Parisien de Saint-Ouen.
Suzanne Valadon received no formal education and was a self-learner who studied art by noting other painters and practicing.
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