Mother sits in an armchair facing left daughter sits on a cushion on the floor, her head against her mother’s knees and a doll sits on the daughter’s lap, staring straight down the middle. In “Marie Coca and Her Daughter Gilberte,” the artist simply twists her subjects in opposite directions. They seem about as familiar as strangers in an elevator. (She looks, naturally enough, like a woman gazing into a mirror.) Behind them hangs a mustard-colored curtain that emphasizes the waxy stiffness of their faces. Valadon’s son slumps over disconsolately her elderly mother stares passively her tall young lover earnestly occupies his corner while Valadon herself looks out warily, her mind somewhere else. In a 1912 “Family Portrait,” it’s the content that’s unnerving. The boy stands out like a paper doll come to life, but only so far - the smoldering line that cuts him out of the scene also welds him back in. Though Valadon contours her son beautifully, capturing the tautness of his belly and the turn of his foot, even conveying the childish smoothness of his skin, the line itself is slow and thick. Behind him, Valadon’s mother, his caretaker, squats on the floor half-drawn, an apparition. His arms extend forward but bend back again to hold a towel behind his shoulders, and his head tilts down in concentration. Utrillo steps naked out of a washtub in “Maurice and His Grandmother,” a black crayon drawing from around 1890. And that all starts with her precise but powerful line, as the exhibit makes clear in a tantalizing handful of drawings and prints. Still, the real revelation is the shocking visual splendor of Valadon’s work. Her frank and unsexy treatment of other nudes, her candid self portraits, the defiantly bored and irritated expressions she often gave her models, even the trousers on the cigarette-smoking woman lounging across “The Blue Room,” all do count as brazen steps forward for their time.
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Her 1909 “Adam and Eve,” a moody, greenish-gray self portrait with Utter that shows them plucking fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, may have been the first full male nude ever painted by a European woman 11 years later, to show it at the Salon des Indépendants, Valadon had to add a leafy loincloth. But she didn’t pick up a paintbrush herself till 1909, at 44, when she left her businessman husband for the painter André Utter, a friend and contemporary of her son’s.īut Valadon’s art was certainly rebellious. Just shy of 30, she made an advantageous marriage that let her give up modeling and devote her time to drawing.
(The child, Maurice Utrillo, also became a successful painter, though he struggled with alcohol and mental illness.) Valadon sold drawings and etchings, befriended Edgar Degas, and carefully studied the painters who painted her, learning from the way they worked. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who painted her hung over, nicknamed her “Suzanna” - a reference to a biblical parable about voyeurism and lust that she liked so much she dropped her actual birth name, Marie-Clémentine.Īt 18 she gave birth to a son, whom her friend Miguel Utrillo later endowed with a surname, though he may not have been the father. Gustav Wertheimer made her a siren, floating naked from the wave to entrap sailors with a kiss.
After a few unsuccessful career attempts, which she later claimed included a circus act, Valadon began modeling for artists in her teens. PHILADELPHIA - It’s hard to believe that “Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel” at the Barnes Foundation is the first American museum show for this sensational French painter.īorn in Bessines-sur-Gartempe and raised in Paris by a single mother, Valadon (1865-1938) began drawing at the age of 9.
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