Galerie des Modernes

En | Fr

Suzanne Valadon

Impressionnism, Montmartre, Group of Modern Women, Bohem lifstyle

(1865, Bessines-sur-Gartempes- 1938, Paris)

Marie Clementine Valadon, better known as Suzanne Valadon, was a French painter. The daughter of a laundress, Suzanne Valadon became a circus acrobat in 1880, until a fall put a premature end to this activity. In the Montmartre neighborhood, where she lived first with her mother, then with her son, the future painter Maurice Utrillo, born in 1883, she had the opportunity to learn art.

Her beauty attracted the eyes of artists and, as she became their model, she observed their work, and so learned their techniques. A model for Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, she built relationships with them. She frequented the bars of Montmartre where the Parisian bourgeoisie came slumming. During this period, Toulouse-Lautrec made her portrait titled Gueule de Bois.

Edgar Degas, quickly remarked the sharp lines of her drawings and paintings, and he encouraged her efforts. She found some success and managed to free herself from the financial difficulties of her youth.

Suzanne Valadon painted still lifes, bouquets and landscapes, remarkable by the force of their composition and vibrant colors. She was also known for her nudes. Her first exhibitions in the early 1890s mainly included portraits, notably that of Erik Satie with whom she had a relationship in 1893.

In 1894, Suzanne Valadon was the first woman admitted to the National Society of Fine Arts. A perfectionist, she would work several years on one painting before even exhibiting it.

The painter then found in the gallery owner, Berthe Weill, a solid ally that supported her work. Berthe promoted Suzanne Valadon’s work with nearly nineteen exhibitions between 1913 and 1932, including three personal retrospectives.

Her marriage in 1896 with a stockbroker, ended up in 1909. Suzanne then left her husband for her son's friend, the painter André Utter (1886-1948), whom she married in 1914. This union lasted nearly thirty years. In 1923, she bought the Utter the Castle of St. Bernard, in the north of Lyon, to cut with her son’s  alcohol problems.

At the end of her life, Suzanne Valadon became friends with the painter Gazi Tatar and, and she was so moved by this encounter that began to paint again.

Suzanne Valadon died on April 7th, 1938, surrounded by her friends André Derain, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. She is buried in the Parisian cemetery of Saint-Ouen.

Her works are kept in many museums, including the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Grenoble, the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon. A permanent exhibition was dedicated to her in Bessines-sur-Gartempe (Haute-Vienne), her hometown.

read more

Work(s)