From a model, she became an artist. From January 15 to May 26, 2025, Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) is in the spotlight at the Center Pompidou for an unprecedented retrospective.
More than 200 works are brought together. Her own, but also those of her fellow painters: Juliette Roche, Hélène Delasalle and even Émilie Charmy.
Nudes far from eroticism
If Suzanne Valadon is mainly recognized for her nudes, male and female, there is never any question of eroticism with her. His works are more interested in the search for details and nuance.
Lying on the bed in her bedroom, she smokes a cigarette, books placed at her feet. It is difficult not to see in this painting painted in 1923 by Suzanne Valadon a prefiguration ofA room of one’s own, this intimate space that Virginia Woolf so desperately called for in her famous essay published in 1929, a place of retreat where one can emancipate and reinvent oneself.
An artist who knew how to establish herself
Manifesto picture of the free and modern woman, The Blue Room appears in the magnificent retrospective that the Center Pompidou is devoting to the artist who did not have an eye in her pocket, because it is by being the model of Puvis de Chavannes, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec that she He was trained in painting, before sovereignly freeing himself from his peers and imposing his own style.
After the exhibitions devoted to Alice Neel, Georgia O’Keeffe, Dora Maar and Germaine Richier, this retrospective rich in 200 paintings and drawings confirms the Center Pompidou’s commitment to women artists, and the singularity of Suzanne Valadon, who knew free yourself from the conventions of your time.
-Suzanne Valadonfrom January 15 to May 26 at the Center Pompidou, Paris 4th.
This review was originally published in Marie Claire magazine issue 869, dated February 2025.
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