In 2023, the “Suzanne Valadon” retrospective at the Center Pompidou-Metz began awkwardly by giving much space to the painters for whom she had posed in her youth. For its last stop in Beaubourg (1), after Nantes then Barcelona, the exhibition opens, this time, with a series of self-portraits which immediately reveal the strength of this self-taught woman with steel blue eyes, determined at 18 years to establish himself on an artistic scene then largely dominated by men.
As for those who photographed her naked, while she observed them at work, Toulouse-Lautrec (with whom she had an affair), Puvis de Chavannes, Auguste Renoir or Jean-Jacques Henner, they are carefully confined to a small room. Even Erik Satie, of whom she painted an amusing portrait, finds himself returning to the refrain of his Vexations, composed after their breakup.
Confronted with her contemporaries
We can thus judge, through 180 works, the talent of Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) in different genres. If we quickly pass by the still lifes, bouquets and landscapes, vaguely inspired by Cézanne, we can taste this trait in two drawing cabinets “hard and soft” praised by Degas. Like her mentor who introduced her to intaglio engraving, the young woman excels at capturing the intimacy of women in the tub, combing their hair or stretching. She sketches the toilet of her child – the future painter, Maurice Utrillo – or a little girl sitting, naked and sullen. In The Forsaken Dollshe paints a teenager who measures her shape with curiosity in a mirror.
Resolutely feminist, the hanging highlights, alongside self-portraits and nudes surrounded by a black line, works by contemporaries like Marie Laurencin or the little-known Georgette Agutte, Alice Bailly, Émilie Charmy, Angèle Delasalle… The audacity of Valadon seems all the more singular.
At the time, only this freedwoman drew her lover – André Utter, who was 20 years younger than her – in the simplest camera. Then dare to magnify it in large format compositions. Inspired by The Joy of Living of Matisse, she gives her own version – from the Metropolitan Museum in New York – where bathers offer themselves to the gaze of the completely naked young man in a green paradise.
She also paints herself alongside him, Adam and Eve. A painting which Nathalie Ernoult, conservation officer at the Pompidou Center, recently discovered had once been torn – no doubt by Utter in one of the couple’s crises –, just like the family portrait, where she sits between her mother, her son and her lover, her hand placed on her heart…
Portraits of bourgeois women, frozen in their armchairs
Did the one who won by using the nickname “Terrible Maria” learn to defend herself very early on? His female nudes oscillate between assumed sensuality and refusal, legs crossed, arms folded on the chest. With a keen eye on the condition of women of his time, Valadon painted, in his maturity, portraits of frozen, pensive bourgeois women, sunk in an armchair, or even a melancholic mother-daughter duo, both adorned with the same necklace and the same knot in the hair that surrounds them.
There is no doubt that she prefers emancipated women, like Mauricia Coquiot, circus artist (and future politician), who poses, standing and proud, in cleavage. In The Blue Roomthe artist still depicts a buxom brunette in pajamas, smoking on her bed with a pile of books lying around, without worrying about the gaze of men. A snub claimed toOlympia by Manet!
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