Suzanne Valadon’s painterly style was brash and unflinching. She was self-taught, gleaning tips and techniques from the painters for whom she modeled, and she did not shy away from harsh colors. An 1898 self-portrait places green shadows across her forehead and chin to create a vivid contrast with the glaring reddish tones that dominate the composition. She returned to herself as a subject repeatedly, and in another self-portrait from 1931, appears as a bare-breasted 66-year-old with the same resolute gaze and piercing expression as her younger self. Despite Valadon’s proximity to artists investigating abstraction, including Picasso and Matisse, she remained—firmly, even stubbornly—committed to representation throughout her career.
A recent swell of attention devoted to the French painter—the subject of six major exhibitions in as many years, including a 200-work retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through May 26—has generated no clear conclusions about Valadon’s place within the history of art. The Pompidou show, revealingly, has no subtitle: It is simply “Suzanne Valadon.” A previous exhibition at the institution’s Metz location declared the artist to be in “A World of Her Own,” both celebrating and isolating her contributions. A 2021 exhibition at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation subtitled “Model, Painter, Rebel” signaled the multiple roles the artist played in her lifetime.
While failing to characterize Valadon’s work definitively, these titles are an improvement on the historical telling of her story. Valadon (1865–1938), who came of age in the heady world of Montmartre’s cabaret scene, achieved commercial success as an artist in her lifetime. But she fell under the shadow of her artist son, Maurice Utrillo. When she has been written about, it is often in reference to the male artists with whom she associated. Books dedicated to Valadon refer to her as The Mistress of Montmartre and Renoir’s Dancer. Even the name by which we know her, Suzanne, was based on her bodily availability to the male gaze—after Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec compared Valadon, who was then a popular model called Maria (born Marie-Clémentine), to the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders.
The recent exhibitions, in focusing on Valadon’s art rather than her personal life or modeling career, reveal a broader shift in the art world toward prioritizing female agency. In her iconic essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” one of Linda Nochlin’s explanations for the lack was propriety: Women were not permitted to study the male body, the most vaunted subject of 19th-century academic painting. Perhaps, then, this explains the fascination with Valadon’s representations of nudes, which have featured heavily in every recent exhibition and publication about her work.
Suzanne Valadon: Adam and Eve, 1909.
Courtesy Centre Pompidou, Paris
Rendering naked figures was Valadon’s most blatant assumption of her own power. Adam and Eve (1909), a thinly veiled portrait of Valadon and her future (second) husband André Utter, is often hailed as the first representation of a naked man by a female artist. With its slender figures laced with sinewy muscles, the painting proves Valadon was comfortable with the human body in all its flawed reality (the fig leaves for modesty were a later, unwelcome, addition). A slew of Valadon’s portraits of female models includes soft bellies, sharp collar bones, and visible body hair, and the recent exhibitions of her work celebrate her unidealized approach to this canonical art subject.
But Nochlin was calling for much more than simply adding female artists to the existing canon and modes of representation. She saw the absence of significant female figures in art history as a “crucial question of the discipline as a whole”—one that, once answered, might transform the field and “challenge traditional divisions of intellectual inquiry.” Valadon’s revolutionary potential for art history lies not in her essential femaleness but instead in her participation in a radical milieu during a formative moment in the modern city of Paris. Her work speaks not only to the history of art but also to the emergence of mass culture at a time when so-called high art and popular representation became inextricably intertwined.
VALADON WAS NOT just female but poor. Her mother was a laundress in a small town in western France, her father unknown to her. The two came to Paris around 1866, settling in the working-class district of Montmartre a few short years before the arrival of both war and popular revolution. Valadon, only 4 years old when Prussian troops invaded the city, was sent to live with an aunt in Nantes. She missed the siege and the Commune that came after, but returned to a city marked by the scars of battle and a neighborhood characterized by revolt.
That defiant spirit fueled Valadon as she made her way in life, working odd jobs, modeling, and drawing for her own pleasure. She became a single mother at age 18 to Maurice Utrillo, giving him the last name of a Spanish journalist who was a friend. Marriage to a banker in 1896 afforded her the opportunity to focus on painting, but the partnership dissolved when Valadon later began an affair with André Utter, who was Maurice’s friend. That she became a successful artist despite these circumstances testifies not only to her determination (which critics often coded as “virile” and “masculine”) but also to the possibilities for social mobility in the rapidly changing world of late 19th-century Paris.
Suzanne Valadon: Self-portrait with Bare Breasts, 1931.
©Akg-images
Valadon was working on the cusp of 20th-century modernity, a period of profound transformation in where and how people lived and the opportunities they enjoyed for leisure and pleasure. Montmartre experienced an influx of residents displaced from the gentrifying center of Paris, notably the community of artists who would provide Valadon’s initial livelihood as well as entertainers—including some at a circus, at which she claims to have performed—who would make her life so lively.
Nearby neighborhoods also welcomed arrivals from France’s overseas colonies, contributing to a growing demographic of people of color that art historian Denise Murrell has traced in her work on 19th-century Paris. Valadon captured, obliquely, one aspect of this changing city in a series of five portraits of a Black model painted in 1919. When two of the paintings went on view at the Barnes Foundation in 2021, the museum convened and published a roundtable of scholars including Murrell and Ebonie Pollock (whose undergraduate thesis first brought the paintings to scholarly attention).
As part of the roundtable, Adrienne Childs cautioned against reading the images as free of the racism that defined Valadon’s time and that mars the long history of depictions of Black women. But Valadon, having worked as a model herself, may have been uniquely capable of understanding aspects of the Black woman’s experience, registering an embodied empathy for the tension in the figure’s left arm, which supports her weight, or the strain on her right, holding an apple steadily aloft as Valadon herself had in Adam and Eve. Times were changing, and Valadon was both benefiting from and recording that change.
Valadon’s capacity for appreciating change makes the still lifes she produced in the 1920s and ’30s feel especially fresh. Like the nudes, they are in dialogue with one of the most traditional forms of painting, harkening back to Jean Siméon Chardin’s 17th-century compositions and Edouard Manet’s 19th-century adaptations. Yet they are equally testaments to the fullness and freedom of Valadon’s life.
Suzanne Valadon: The Violin Case, 1923.
Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, Paris
The Violin Case (1923) is rich with pattern, texture, and color, and Valadon’s large-scale painting of male nudes, Casting the Net (1914), forms its backdrop—those characteristically lean legs seeming to walk amid a table strewn with patterned textiles, ceramic vases, a jug of flowers, a well-worn book, and the violin of the title.
The inclusion of her own painting within another composition signals that these aren’t neutral or even symbolic objects. They are aspects of Valadon’s lived experience. Rendered unfussily, with the same unflinching gaze she brought to her models, the depicted things represent both the finest of art and the most quotidian of artifacts. They capture the world of Montmartre as one of sensory pleasure, a place where music, painting, and literature were available to everyone, even those born without privilege. Working between art and the everyday, Valadon opened up new possibilities for an art of the everyday—an idea of art we continue to benefit from in the present.
