Suzanne Valadon is a mute face with a direct look, a certain alloy between femininity and virility. A grace from the dawn of time and the orantes of the Renaissance of which she has the wise gesture. And an underground force, a disarming assurance like when a child confronts an adult.
For the first time in France in sixty years, a museum is devoting a monographic exhibition to this "model, painter and rebel" woman, as defined by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in 2021, then the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen in 2022. And it is a paradox of this museum tribute so brilliant to Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) to make her, in the end, as enigmatic as the sphinx. Even if she offered herself, naked, to the great painters of her time - Puvis de Chavannes, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec ... - she remains a secret.
See alsoValadon, Utrillo and Utter at the ball of the cursed
With Suzanne Valadon, the Centre Pompidou-Metz literally swirls with life. The time machine is in motion that takes you to this Paris where the turn of the century will mark the revolution of modern art, a matter of men first. Cubism and abstract art are in the bud; But this rebel ardently defends reality. Far from these debates, Suzanne Valadon the self-taught takes her woman's gaze on her time, on the masters she frequents or subjugates, on her models captured outside of male desire - the "male gaze" decried by feminist art historians - on her own and especially on her. "I drew madly so that, when I ran out of eyes, I have (sic) at my fingertips," she said.
The public is clearly seized by the life of this artist whose face and body are constantly repeating and changing. The Austrian Gustav Wertheimer (1847-1902) made her in 1882 a blonde mermaid who arches above the waves, like the acrobat she once was. Toulouse-Lautrec captures it in profile, disheveled, hard and absent to others, in his black ink drawing La Buveuse ou Gueule de bois, 1889, a theme dear to Degas and Picasso. On the eve of her full artistic recognition, she represented herself in 1911 in strong flat areas like a Gauguin, yellow skin, work bun, pallet in hand. Action!
Maria before Suzanne
Suzanne Valadon's name is not Suzanne, but Marie-Clémentine Valadon. Born on September 23, 1865, of unknown father, in the countryside of Limoges, in Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute-Vienne, this brunette has a little closed face à la Audrey Tautou. She moved with her mother to Montmartre, in search of prosperity. At the age of 15, she gave up working in the circus following a bad fall and became a model for the painters of Montmartre under the name Maria. And more. The "old beau", Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, with whom she spent taboo hours in the beautiful workshop of Neuilly, made her a blonde vestal (La Toilette, 1883, bought by the State in 1932 and now at the Musée d'Orsay).
It seduces Degas, whose collection of drawings by Suzanne Valadon speaks respectfully. "Painters choose them, and rarely the other way around," says novelist Jean-Paul Delfino. Thus the Frenchman Forain, the American Howland, the Italian De Nittis or the Frenchman Henner, who returns from the Villa Medici in Rome, Princess Mathilde, cousin of Napoleon II. But also Renoir, because the master is from Limoges, like her. Her "regular", Aline Charigot, chases her for excessive proximity. "You who pose naked for old men, you should be called Suzanne!", enjoins this "madman of Toulouse-Lautrec", painter, lover, who opens his avant-garde library to him (Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Büchner). He made a brutal nude portrait and a fabulous painting (La Grosse Maria, 1884, on loan from the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal). Suzanne Valadon will be his signature. Or even Suzanne, quite simply.
Summer, also says Adam and Eve of Suzanne Valadon. Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Jacqueline Hyde
"Valadon's work is rooted in Montmartre, the cradle of the Paris Commune, which had welcomed magnificent revolutionary figures, such as Louise Michel. It reflects an open Europe in the aftermath of the industrial revolution, argues Chiara Parisi, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz and curator. The exhibition defends a form of territorial conquest that history has traditionally assigned to the masculine. The conquest of a world "of one's own". His unique trajectory, from model to artist, as well as his independence from the avant-garde have sometimes earned him to remain on the margins of art history. The Musée national d'art moderne, which still holds the largest collection of Valadon works at the Centre Pompidou, has always been faithful to her" (Summer, also called Adam and Eve, 1909, double nude portrait with her husband, the painter André Utter, twenty years her junior, whose sex she later covered with a fig leaf, a decisive loan from Beaubourg).
Strength of character
In Metz, the demonstration is striking (Family Portraits, 1912, splendid composition with mother, husband and son). Suzanne Valadon, cute, earthly, arrogant, hermetic, literally takes flesh, in her first drawings as in the wall of portraits that sign her commercial success, in the 1920s. This exhibition surprises by its obviousness, while Suzanne Valadon remained for a long time in the shadow of her masters, her lovers, her son the painter Maurice Utrillo, a kind of epiphenomenon in the history of art (the comments of her doctor, after her death, who is reluctant to call her an artist, are very funny, to see in a video of newsreels).
The exhibition defends a form of territorial conquest that history has traditionally assigned to the masculine. The conquest of a world "of one's own".
Chiara Parisi, Director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz and curator
She immediately poses the character by her correspondence with her son, her husband scandalously of the same age, with his painters who became models in turn. His strength of character and intelligence have survived the centuries. Then by her prolific work - she would have left at her death nearly 500 paintings and 300 works on paper - whose wild freedom announces the expressionists and is found, all raw, in the American Alice Neel (1900-1984), whom the Centre Pompidou has just made discover in the capital. The Centre Pompidou-Metz confronts Balthus and his suavely perverse nudes with its unvarnished gaze.
In Paris, the Musée de Montmartre has reconstructed its studio-apartment at 12, rue Cortot. She settled there for the first time in 1898, returning with her son and husband from 1912 to 1926. A great bargain hunter, Hubert Le Gall drew the findings of his scenography from the paintings of Suzanne Valadon and her son Maurice Utrillo. One of the wonders of Montmartre.
"Suzanne Valadon, Un monde à soi", until 11 September at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Catalogue edited by Chiara Parisi (Éditions du Centre Pompidou-Metz, 264 pages, 42 €). The exhibition will then go to the Musée d'arts de Nantes, from 27 October to 11 February 2024, then to the Museu National d'Art de Catalunya, in Barcelona, from 18 April to 1 September 2024.