In 1931, when she had turned 66, Suzanne Valadon portrayed herself naked from the waist up: her hard, defiant gaze and shamelessly sagging breasts, proof of a long journey through life, but still ready to continue enjoying her sexuality, clinging to her own desire like the necklace that hugs her neck. Art was full of female nudes, and she chose to be one of them, but not just any one for the male gaze, but one in which she could recognize herself as someone who thinks and chooses. Alone in the last stage of her electrifying existence, abandoned by her husband, the painter André Utter, a friend of her son twenty-one years younger than her, the established painter who one day had driven Erik Satie crazy wanders through the bohemian night of Paris looking for someone to share his bed with.
Suzanne Valadon, born Marie-Clémentine to a single mother, had been baptized by Toulouse-Lautrec, one of the many lovers for whom she posed as a teenager after an accident at the Montmatre circus in which she had joined dislocated her. of sequins and trapeze. Since she was surrounded by old men (Degas, Renoir, Puvis de Chavannes), she would be called Suzanne, like the young girl in the biblical story who is abused by relentless male eyes. Only she was looking too. While she was a model, she carefully studied the painters who painted her, learning from them, catching them in the act of trying to catch her. One of them left her pregnant at the age of 18 with her son Maurice – to whom the Catalan artist Miguel Utrillo lent his last name out of pity – who over time became a relevant painter who overshadowed her, despite his attachment to the bottle. and street brawls since childhood.
Suzanne Valadon had a brave heart. She was a free, ingenious, intelligent and extravagant woman, whose social status (daughter of a washerwoman) allowed her to break taboos and go where no other had dared. Although she never stopped drawing, she did not take up the brush seriously until she was 44, when fleeing a bourgeois life she left her husband, a wealthy lawyer, for the friend of her son, André Utter.
She portrayed nude women with a frank, unsexy quality that broke with the convention of idealized femininity, and painted what are considered the first male nudes by a woman, such as Adam and Eve, she and her young painter lover, whose sex she had to cover with a loincloth made of fig leaves for her presentation at the Salon des Independientes in 1920. She triumphed by being the owner of her life and her brush, and died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 72 in the ambulance that was driving her. to hospital. She then slowly sank into history until the radiant and riotous canvases of her have recently been rediscovered. You can write it down: in mid-April she will arrive at the MNAC.
