Formidable Valadon retrospective
On the occasion of the exhibition "Suzanne Valadon. Un monde à soi" on view at the Centre Pompidou-Metz until 11 September.
Black circles, Fauvist faces, Ingresque bodies... Not since its inaugural exhibition, Chefs-d'œuvre, has the Centre Pompidou-Metz been so unanimously acclaimed. By offering on a silver platter the life and work of Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938), an artist who became a major figure in the history of art through her own strength, and whose painting, even though it draws on all the others, belongs to her alone, the art centre is attracting countless art lovers who are resistant to contemporary art as much as anyone else. And no one is di
On the occasion of the exhibition "Suzanne Valadon. Un monde à soi" on view at the Centre Pompidou-Metz until 11 September.
Black circles, Fauvist faces, Ingresque bodies... Not since its inaugural exhibition, Chefs-d'œuvre, has the Centre Pompidou-Metz been so unanimously acclaimed. By offering on a silver platter the life and work of Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938), an artist who became a major figure in the history of art through her own strength, and whose painting, even though it draws on all the others, belongs to her alone, the art centre is attracting countless art lovers who are resistant to contemporary art as much as anyone else. And no one is disappointed. The temptation of the reassuringly figurative is great. So much the better, let the doors open wide to this fascinating body of work, both transgressive and radical, and let everyone come and wander around the third floor, which has been transformed into a giant art gallery, where more than two hundred works of art by Suzanne Valadon stand alongside those of Pierre Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes or Gustav Wertheimer, who took her as a model when her own works of art for sale did not yet allow her to make a living.
Suzanne Valadon's extraordinary destiny is as attractive today as her work. Her rebellious character, her life and her art, shared with her son Maurice Utrillo and her husband André Utter, have never ceased to nourish her interpretation. Each facet of the epic story of this artist in contact with different cosmos paints an essential portrait of nascent modernity, sheds light on an era on the edge of two worlds, taking the viewer from the 19th to the 20th century.
Almost sixty years after the last retrospective of Suzanne Valadon in France, which the Musée National d'Art Moderne celebrated in 1967 in Paris, the exhibition highlights the figure of this exceptional artist. "Suzanne Valadon. Un monde à soi" aims to highlight the expressive and resolutely contemporary character of her work and to place Valadon in the context of an art history that has paid little attention to this daring artist. An artist whose work has long been considered on the fringe of the dominant trends of her time - cubism and abstract art are in the making - while she ardently defends the need to paint the real.
Born on 23 September 1865 in Bessines-sur-Gartempe in the Haute-Vienne, Marie-Clémentine Valadon moved to Montmartre with her mother, who had come to Paris to seek prosperity. For a time, the young girl was a trapeze artist, but at the age of 15, when she suffered a bad fall, she had to give up working in the circus. She then became a model, posing for Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, then for Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jean-Jacques Henner, Gustav Wertheimer, Federico Zandomeneghi, Jean-Eugène Clary, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen and Vojtěch Hynais. She then called herself Maria, then became Suzanne, adopting the name Toulouse-Lautrec gave her in reference to the biblical episode of "Suzanne et les Vieillards". Taking advantage of her posing sessions, which she transformed into veiled lessons, she retained here and there a gesture, a touch, a line. Valadon, simultaneously model and artist, sharpens her pencil line, freely displays herself as the heir to her elders without being their pupil.
Several iconic works depicting her are brought together for the exhibition, such as drawings by Puvis de Chavannes between 1883 and 1889, when she was his favourite model, Toulouse-Lautrec's La Grosse Maria (1884), and Renoir's Danse à la ville (1883). Also in 1883, at the age of 18, she gave birth to Maurice Utrillo and produced a self-portrait in pastel, the first known work that she signed with the name Suzanne Valadon. It was not until 1892 that she painted her first works on canvas, including Young Girl Crocheting, which belongs to the Musée National d'Art Moderne and can be seen here in a fascinating wall of portraits hung like a 19th-century Salon. The year 1894 was marked by her budding friendship with Degas, for whom she would never pose, but who would become one of her greatest collectors. He taught her intaglio engraving and supported her among their peers. They both shared the common idea of a soft, hard line and an intimate, unabashed model.
Although Suzanne Valadon's work was recognised very early on by critics, institutions and artists, which enabled her to find takers for her works of art for sale, today's public often knows her only through the prism of the "infernal trio" of Montmartre that she formed with Maurice Utrillo and André Utter. And her passionate relationships with several major Bohemian figures, including Erik Satie and Miquel Utrillo, have unfortunately too often prevented a detailed analysis of her work. "The biographical temptation is great as soon as the name of Suzanne Valadon is mentioned," writes Colin Lemoine in L'Oeil this May. "Insignificant loves, Montmartre bohemia, a prodigal son, a tempestuous union: her edifying life is a novelistic machine that has something of Emile Zola and Pierre Mac Orlan about it, when the sequel vies with the dazzling. The present exhibition, which is remarkable, avoids this pitfall and crowns a major painter with numerous paintings, including the unforgettable Eté, created in 1909, acquired by the French State in 1937 and now kept by the Centre Pompidou. This famous Summer, also called Adam and Eve, for which she had her lover André Utter, a friend of her son's, twenty-one years her junior, pose, will be the first male nude painted by a woman in the history of art: that alone! And you know what? A repainting of vine leaves was imposed on her to hide the man's sex when she exhibited the painting at the 1920 Autumn Salon! "This almost naïve overpainting, similar to a break-in by Douanier Rousseau in a painting by Egon Schiele, reminds us of the extent to which Suzanne Valadon upset the orthodoxy of the gaze," writes the journalist from L'Oeil.
In exchange for this concession, dubbed "L'éloquente pudibonderie" in the art magazine, Suzanne Valadon, who was already one of the first women admitted to the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and regularly exhibited with Berthe Weill and at the Salon des Indépendants, became a member of the Salon d'automne. A few years later, with La chambre bleue (1923), she portrayed a woman who was ostensibly modern and free of the conventions of her time: breaking with the orientalist tradition of the languid nude, she preferred a body at rest, wearing loose, comfortable clothes, with expressive hands and face. The synthesis of styles is such that this work is seen as precociously feminist, reinventing the codes of painting.
The exhibition echoes the conversations written between the lines of Suzanne Valadon's biography, which draws its inspiration from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, and tells unexpected stories by comparing a substantial body of her work with that of her elders and contemporaries, such as Félix Vallotton, Frédéric Bazille and Lou Albert-Lasard. This dialogue bears witness to the mutual filiations established between artists of the Montmartre Bohemia, such as Santiago Rusiñol and Louis Jean-Baptiste Igout, as well as those of the avant-garde, such as Henri Matisse and Georgette Agutte. The exhibition even offers new insights into the work of her younger contemporaries, such as Balthus, whose works, in terms of their style and subject matter, continue Valadon's research.
Illustration: Suzanne Valadon, Reclining Nude, 1928, oil on canvas, 60 × 80.6 cm New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image of the MMA
Suzanne Valadon's extraordinary destiny is as attractive today as her work. Her rebellious character, her life and her art, shared with her son Maurice Utrillo and her husband André Utter, have never ceased to nourish her interpretation. Each facet of the epic story of this artist in contact with different cosmos paints an essential portrait of nascent modernity, sheds light on an era on the edge of two worlds, taking the viewer from the 19th to the 20th century.
Almost sixty years after the last retrospective of Suzanne Valadon in France, which the Musée National d'Art Moderne celebrated in 1967 in Paris, the exhibition highlights the figure of this exceptional artist. "Suzanne Valadon. Un monde à soi" aims to highlight the expressive and resolutely contemporary character of her work and to place Valadon in the context of an art history that has paid little attention to this daring artist. An artist whose work has long been considered on the fringe of the dominant trends of her time - cubism and abstract art are in the making - while she ardently defends the need to paint the real.
Born on 23 September 1865 in Bessines-sur-Gartempe in the Haute-Vienne, Marie-Clémentine Valadon moved to Montmartre with her mother, who had come to Paris to seek prosperity. For a time, the young girl was a trapeze artist, but at the age of 15, when she suffered a bad fall, she had to give up working in the circus. She then became a model, posing for Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, then for Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jean-Jacques Henner, Gustav Wertheimer, Federico Zandomeneghi, Jean-Eugène Clary, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen and Vojtěch Hynais. She then called herself Maria, then became Suzanne, adopting the name Toulouse-Lautrec gave her in reference to the biblical episode of "Suzanne et les Vieillards". Taking advantage of her posing sessions, which she transformed into veiled lessons, she retained here and there a gesture, a touch, a line. Valadon, simultaneously model and artist, sharpens her pencil line, freely displays herself as the heir to her elders without being their pupil.
Several iconic works depicting her are brought together for the exhibition, such as drawings by Puvis de Chavannes between 1883 and 1889, when she was his favourite model, Toulouse-Lautrec's La Grosse Maria (1884), and Renoir's Danse à la ville (1883). Also in 1883, at the age of 18, she gave birth to Maurice Utrillo and produced a self-portrait in pastel, the first known work that she signed with the name Suzanne Valadon. It was not until 1892 that she painted her first works on canvas, including Young Girl Crocheting, which belongs to the Musée National d'Art Moderne and can be seen here in a fascinating wall of portraits hung like a 19th-century Salon. The year 1894 was marked by her budding friendship with Degas, for whom she would never pose, but who would become one of her greatest collectors. He taught her intaglio engraving and supported her among their peers. They both shared the common idea of a soft, hard line and an intimate, unabashed model.
Although Suzanne Valadon's work was recognised very early on by critics, institutions and artists, which enabled her to find takers for her works of art for sale, today's public often knows her only through the prism of the "infernal trio" of Montmartre that she formed with Maurice Utrillo and André Utter. And her passionate relationships with several major Bohemian figures, including Erik Satie and Miquel Utrillo, have unfortunately too often prevented a detailed analysis of her work. "The biographical temptation is great as soon as the name of Suzanne Valadon is mentioned," writes Colin Lemoine in L'Oeil this May. "Insignificant loves, Montmartre bohemia, a prodigal son, a tempestuous union: her edifying life is a novelistic machine that has something of Emile Zola and Pierre Mac Orlan about it, when the sequel vies with the dazzling. The present exhibition, which is remarkable, avoids this pitfall and crowns a major painter with numerous paintings, including the unforgettable Eté, created in 1909, acquired by the French State in 1937 and now kept by the Centre Pompidou. This famous Summer, also called Adam and Eve, for which she had her lover André Utter, a friend of her son's, twenty-one years her junior, pose, will be the first male nude painted by a woman in the history of art: that alone! And you know what? A repainting of vine leaves was imposed on her to hide the man's sex when she exhibited the painting at the 1920 Autumn Salon! "This almost naïve overpainting, similar to a break-in by Douanier Rousseau in a painting by Egon Schiele, reminds us of the extent to which Suzanne Valadon upset the orthodoxy of the gaze," writes the journalist from L'Oeil.
In exchange for this concession, dubbed "L'éloquente pudibonderie" in the art magazine, Suzanne Valadon, who was already one of the first women admitted to the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and regularly exhibited with Berthe Weill and at the Salon des Indépendants, became a member of the Salon d'automne. A few years later, with La chambre bleue (1923), she portrayed a woman who was ostensibly modern and free of the conventions of her time: breaking with the orientalist tradition of the languid nude, she preferred a body at rest, wearing loose, comfortable clothes, with expressive hands and face. The synthesis of styles is such that this work is seen as precociously feminist, reinventing the codes of painting.
The exhibition echoes the conversations written between the lines of Suzanne Valadon's biography, which draws its inspiration from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, and tells unexpected stories by comparing a substantial body of her work with that of her elders and contemporaries, such as Félix Vallotton, Frédéric Bazille and Lou Albert-Lasard. This dialogue bears witness to the mutual filiations established between artists of the Montmartre Bohemia, such as Santiago Rusiñol and Louis Jean-Baptiste Igout, as well as those of the avant-garde, such as Henri Matisse and Georgette Agutte. The exhibition even offers new insights into the work of her younger contemporaries, such as Balthus, whose works, in terms of their style and subject matter, continue Valadon's research.
Illustration: Suzanne Valadon, Reclining Nude, 1928, oil on canvas, 60 × 80.6 cm New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image of the MMA