Suzanne Valadon

Beatrice Loayza

Painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, influenced by Gauguin, mentored by Degas: an exhibition of over 170 works by the turn-of-the-century French artist.

Suzanne Valadon, installation view. Courtesy Centre Pompidou. Photo: Audrey Laurans. Pictured, far left: Jeune fille faisant du crochet, ca. 1892.

Suzanne Valadon, curated by Nathalie Ernoult, Chiara Parisi, and Xavier Rey, Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou, Paris, France,
through May 26, 2025

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Suzanne Valadon (née Marie-Clémentine) was just a teenager when she started modeling for painters, though the muse portion of her career was short-lived. She wasn’t suited to sitting still for too long. Look at her in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s La grosse Marie (1884), staring back at the viewer with a wry, tight-lipped smile. The painting—currently on view at the Centre Pompidou’s stellar retrospective of Valadon—is atypical for a female nude at the time. Her breasts are bared, the dark patch of her pubic hair visible, but she’s seated in a three-quarter profile, her hands grasping her thighs, projecting cool self-assurance. Ingres’s Portrait of Monsieur Bertin (1832) might come to mind were Valadon not butt-naked, though Toulouse-Lautrec must’ve aspired to a similar ennoblement: the title translates to “Big Marie,” and Valadon was barely five feet tall.

Suzanne Valadon, installation view. Courtesy Centre Pompidou. Photo: Audrey Laurans.

Born in 1865, Valadon grew up poor in Montmartre, Paris’s famed bohemian enclave, and worked as a laundress, nanny, and circus performer throughout her adolescence. Free to partake in the city’s nightlife because of her low social ranking, she made inroads with the artists who hung out at the local cafes, cabarets, and dance halls. In other words, she was a party girl, and the facility with which she maneuvered in male society earned her a legendary list of lovers—Toulouse-Lautrec, Puvis de Chavannes, Erik Satie, Pierre-Auguste Renoir—whom she modeled for and inspired. All the while, she observed their processes, eventually revealing herself to be a deft draftswoman in her own right; “Suzanne” was her nom de plume. In the early 1890s, upon inspecting her portfolio of pencil, graphite, and charcoal sketches, Edward Degas (who would become Valadon’s most important mentor) exclaimed: “You are one of us!”

Suzanne Valadon, installation view. Courtesy Centre Pompidou. Photo: Audrey Laurans.

Valadon’s early drawings—of herself and her mother, Madeleine, and her son, Maurice Utrillo (who would take up painting, per his mother’s suggestion, after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, and become celebrated for his cityscapes)—echoed the Impressionists’ striving for truth in everyday life. From the beginning, her work emphasized psychological and physical complexity, and her first subjects were the women and children in her working-class milieu (as her career evolved and she gained entry into bourgeois society, she also rendered portraits of art patrons and socialites).

Suzanne Valadon, Catherine nue allongée sur une peau de panthère, 1923. Courtesy Lucien Arkas Collection. Photo: Hadiye Cangokce.

In 1892, Valadon began painting, producing oil-on-canvas works such as Jeune fille faisant du crochet, which already (albeit in a muted manner) exhibited her signatures: bold, confident outlines; raw and unrefined yet graceful bodies; vibrant, contrasting hues (Paul Gauguin was an influence she openly acknowledged). Later, Valadon would also incorporate highly decorative backgrounds splotched with floral and geometric patterns that, like Henri Matisse’s paintings, turned three-dimensional spaces into flattened ones, with a touch of the surreal. In La chambre bleue (1923)—perhaps Valadon’s most recognizable work—a brunette in startlingly contemporary-looking leisure wear (striped pajama pants and a pink camisole) smokes a cigarette while lounging in bed. She’s encircled by white flowers on her navy-blue bedding and drawn curtains, appearing suspended in a starry night.

Suzanne Valadon, installation view. Courtesy Centre Pompidou. Photo: Hervé Véronèse. Pictured: La chambre bleue, 1923.

La chambre bleue is the primary image used to promote the retrospective, which includes over 170 works by Valadon along with archival photographs and documents. Paintings by her contemporaries, both male and female (Marie Laurencin, Georgette Agutte, Angèle Delasalle, Juliette Roche, and Mela Muter), are speckled throughout the exhibition halls, orbiting planet Valadon. These supporting characters are meant to elucidate the trajectory of her artistic development and the overlapping concerns she held with other artists also carving out their definitions of the “modern” at the turn of the twentieth century.

The clothed anti-odalisque of La chambre bleue, wherein the subject lies naturally, with two books at her feet, is an overt response to the sexualization of the female subject in art history. Valadon’s nude portraits—one of her fortes—consistently upend this fetishistic mode: her women are engaged in their self-care routines (Gilberte nue se coiffant, 1920), their bodies relaxed, unstylized, atop chaises and fur throws, their expressions conveying something between boredom, fatigue, and arousal (Nu au canapé rouge, 1920; Catherine nue allongée sur une peau de panthère, 1923). Having been a model herself, Valadon was surely attuned to the muscular strain and spiritual dreariness of holding a pose—and the gendered politics of voyeurism. In La joie de vivre (1911), Valadon riffs off the bathers of Matisse’s Bonheur de vivre (1905) and Cézanne’s Les grandes baigneuses (1898–1905) by adding to the tableau a nude male subject (modeled after André Utter, her second husband), whom we see with his arms crossed, regarding a group of women as they towel themselves off. Valadon’s work became more pointedly provocative when she met Utter—a friend of her son, and twenty years her junior. She may have been the first European woman to depict full-frontal male nudity, with Adam et Ève (1909), a painting of herself and Utter in biblical guises. (Ten years later, Valadon painted over her beau’s genitalia to publicly exhibit the piece.) She looks coy and nonchalant as she plucks the forbidden fruit; Utter grabs her wrist, though we can’t really tell if he’s stopping or joining her.

Suzanne Valadon, Adam et Ève, 1909. Courtesy Centre Pompidou. Photo: Centre Pompidou.

Despite her rejection of traditional domesticity, Valadon would return, again and again, to the arena of motherhood and adolescent self-discovery, themes informed by her own contentious relationship with her mother. Valadon claimed to never truly know Madeleine, and yet the two women would remain in each other’s lives until Madeleine’s death in 1915. The elder Valadon raised Marie-Clémentine as a single parent, and when Maurice was born, Madeleine begrudgingly took charge of his upbringing as her daughter continued her vie bohème. With her son, the artist may have remained distant, yet her work articulates a different, more sober kind of intimacy: as a child through his transition into adulthood, when he was crippled by sickness, Maurice was one of Valadon’s enduring subjects. In her earliest sketches and studies, we see him as a young boy, his fledgling body soft and awkward.

Suzanne Valadon, installation view. Courtesy Centre Pompidou. Photo: Audrey Laurans. Pictured, center on right wall: La poupée délaissée, 1921. Far right: Marie Coca et sa fille Gilberte, 1913.

The tensions between mothers and their growing children motivate two of Valadon’s most staggering works. In Marie Coca et sa fille Gilberte (1913), Valadon paints her niece seated in a floral wingback, staring off into the distance, seemingly in a state of dissociation; at her feet is her child, Gilberte, looking directly at us, her hand perched atop a toy doll. (In a corner, notice a painting-within-the-painting of Degas’s ballerinas.) Years later, Valadon would portray Gilberte again in La poupée délaissée (1921). The girl is naked and freshly bathed. A stockier Marie Coca lovingly dries her with a towel, but Gilberte doesn’t acknowledge her; she’s turned away from us, staring at her reflection in a hand mirror. Her body has sprouted into that of a young woman’s, and her doll (wearing the same pink bow as in Gilberte’s hair) has been discarded on the floor. Maternal figures are eclipsed in the child’s process of self-realization, a fact ironically echoed in the historical neglect of Valadon’s work relative to that of her son’s. Gilberte’s coming-of-age, meanwhile, bursts with possibility; her doll abandoned, her mother ignored, she tastes the freedom of autonomy, the way it lives in a young woman’s perception of herself and her potential. A few other paintings by Valadon, such La petite fille au miroir (1909) and Nu au miroir (1909), summon this motif, in which young girls seem to deflect the viewer’s sexualization of their bodies through sheer indifference and self-absorption. Each, like Gilberte, is twisting her torso, leaning closer into the mirror, trying to see herself more clearly. Though Valadon’s women are often physically exposed, their secrets and obsessions are their own. What do they see when they look at themselves? Crucially, Gilberte’s reflection in the mirror is obscured, visible only to her.

Beatrice Loayza is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to the New York Times, the Criterion Collection, Film Comment, the Nation, and other publications.