Suzanne Valadon entered the history of art three times – as a model, captured in many famous paintings and drawings, as a gifted artist, and finally, as one of those bright, daring, charming women, without whom it is impossible to imagine the life of the Parisian bohemia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Model

Marie Clementine Valadon, the illegitimate daughter of a laundress, was born in 1865, came to Paris with her mother as a five-year-old girl, did not receive any decent education, loved to draw since childhood and from childhood worked as best she could – served as a nanny, seamstress, waitress in a bistro, traded at the market. She began her career as a circus acrobat, but after a fall from a height, she had to forget about the circus.

Her acquaintance with Parisian artists was helped by her mother’s profession: she opened a laundry in Montmartre, and Marie’s duty became home delivery of linen. One of the laundry’s clients was the famous Lyon artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. He appreciated the girl’s classical forms and expressive face and invited her to pose. Almost all the figures in Puvis de Chavannes’s monumental panel “The Sacred Grove” (1884), which now adorns the lobby of the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon, were painted from the young Marie Clementine.

Soon the girl began posing for other artists – Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Theophile Steinlen. It is she, charming and seductive, who dances on Renoir’s canvases “Dance at Bougival” (1883) and “Dance in the City” (1883), and stands with a basket in her hands against a background of black umbrellas (“Umbrellas”, 1883). It is she, pretty, fresh, with regular features and a sculpted body, who looks out of Renoir’s portrait (“Girl Combing Her Hair”, 1885). It is she, the flexible nude bather by Degas (“Bathing in a Basin”, 1886).

The Artist

The artists who drew and painted Suzanne (this name completely displaced her own over the years) had no idea that the model not only posed, but also diligently studied with each of them. Suzanne carefully watched how drawings and paintings were created, and at home, in secret from everyone, she worked on her own works. For a long time she hesitated to show her creations to anyone, and when she dared, she resorted to trickery: her sketches “as if by accident” caught the eye of Toulouse-Lautrec. Only when Suzanne saw how amazed and delighted he was did she admit that she was painting. Lautrec hung Suzanne’s works in his studio and amazed his guests with them, who could not even imagine that the confident hand of the author belonged to a self-taught artist, and a woman at that!

In 1890, Suzanne showed her works to the strict master Edgar Degas, who without hesitation declared “You are ours!”, bought several works from her and subsequently patronized the young artist. Valadon achieved success and recognition quite quickly. In 1894, she became the first woman accepted into the National Society of Fine Arts, participated in many group exhibitions, but her first solo exhibition took place only in 1911.

Valadon’s earliest surviving works – “Self-Portrait” and “Portrait of Mother” – date back to 1883. These works were followed by street sketches, genre scenes, portraits, nude models, still lifes, flowers, and later, numerous images of her beloved ginger cat Raminou.

Valadon took her work very seriously, spent years perfecting her canvases and claimed – quite in her style – that she kept a goat at home, which she “assigned” to eat unsuccessful canvases. Despite such exactingness of the artist towards herself, her legacy is quite impressive – 475 paintings, 275 drawings, 31 etchings.

Suzanne’s usual materials were pastels and oil paints. Delicate watercolors did not suit her: she loved deep, intense color. In her rich, contrasting canvases, the forms are revealed and emphasized by an energetic dark outline.

In 1896, Valadon married a wealthy stockbroker. A respectable marriage allowed the artist to fully concentrate on painting, but Suzanne would not have been herself if this respectable union had been the end of her stormy life. In 1909, forty-four-year-old Suzanne became infatuated with her son’s friend, the handsome twenty-three-year-old and aspiring artist André Utter. She left her broker and married Utter in 1914.

The house on Rue Cortot, where the “damned trinity” lived and worked from 1912 to 1926, now houses the Montmartre Museum, which in 2015 celebrated the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth with a large retrospective exhibition. A small square at the foot of Montmartre is named after Suzanne Valadon, and a celestial body, the asteroid 6937 Valadon, bears her name.