There is the before and then the after. The chapters of the history of art, like those of any other history, successively amortize each other, and thus the action advances. The reverse direction would be a subversion of the law. However, Suzanne Valadon turns out to be an artist after her own son. He is someone, one would say, who comes after the famous Maurice Utrillo, the quintessential painter of Montmartre: the mill, the snowy squares, the paths between the walls… Born Marie-Clémentine, it was Toulouse-Lautrec who baptized her Suzanne, the appropriate name for someone who exposed herself naked before the eyes of the old painters for whom she served as models: Renoir, Steinlen, Puvis de Chavannes… However, she also watched and learned. She was a very beautiful woman. A character. The person who most encouraged her to become a painter, Edgar Degas, called her “the terrible Mary.” She was the daughter of an unknown father.
Since the times of the Commune, Montmartre formed a separate territory; The police did not enter there. The gardeners with big mustaches carried the vegetables on their mules while the last revelers stumbled out of the new shows… From the Boulevard de Clichy and the Place Pigalle, climbing up the butte, everything was now barracks and cabarets, artists’ studios among the orchards: Van Gogh, Seurat, Lautrec, Signac… Two painters who had arrived from Barcelona, Santiago Rusiñol and Ramón Casas, stayed in the Moulin de la Galette itself. As part of the discreet environment that inspires the assembly of this excellent exhibition, and along with two wonderful bronzes by Degas and a plaster by Matisse, one of the paintings by Rusiñol that evoke that world is In bell, a key work in the museum’s collection. Over the fall of the clearings under construction, we see Suzanne and her lover Miguel Utrillo dressed as a military man with the uniform borrowed by Erik Satie, with whom she also had an affair and of whom she made a wonderful portrait. When that romance ended, the musician, in a state of mourning, composed the Vexations, which play while we wander.
This first Valadon retrospective in Spain, curated by Eduard Vallès and Phillip Dennis Cate, already had the potential to foster collaboration between the MNAC and the Center Pompidou-Metz. But there is more: Utrillo was a Catalan engineer, journalist, critic, cartoonist and the one who made Chinese shadows fashionable in Le Chat Noir and then in Els Quatre Gats, in Barcelona. After much insistence, seven years after his birth, Utrillo recognized the son he had had with Suzanne: Maurice, the famous painter. Then he had others in his marriage, one was called Miguel, a unleashed character from the Spanish post-war who helped César González-Ruano rent the house in Sitges where Ridruejo, Pruna, Cirlot met… By then, Miguel Utrillo Jr. was already He had met Suzanne in Paris, and would meet Maurice shortly before his death devastated by alcohol. He gave details of them in articles and lectures, including the pistol shot that Valadon offered to Miguel Utrillo Sr. as a farewell. Ruano called all this “the Utrillo affair.”
Her stature as a painter goes beyond her legend and the condition of women artists grouped in a supposed ghetto.
But the artistic scope of Suzanne Valadon far exceeds the unstable biography that her legend fosters, and also that condition of women artists that today seems so tempting to group in a ghetto. She did not have the mellowness of Marie Laurencin or Olga Sacharoff, nor the distant elegance of Mary Cassatt. She had been a model, a delivery girl for her mother’s ironed clothes, a seamstress, and an assistant at shows. She decided to be a painter after learning the craft tricks of famous artists. Far from the codified impressionist pattern that made Maurice famous among American collectors, she was led by an infallible intuition and an always alert artistic consciousness towards another truth of life. To save her son and before her husband, the painter André Utter, squandered the profits obtained from the utrillos, Suzanne bought the castle of Saint-Bernard, next to the Saône River.
Maurice and Utter, wounded in the war, each demanded his attention on their own. It took Suzanne a while to find her way. Her family scenes have a gothic gravity. In her nudes from the 1920s, the substantial carnality of Germanic expressionism beats; Sometimes they seem to anticipate Lucian Freud’s bodies on stage. The thick black lines that outline the shapes evoke Cézanne, Derain. The undulating sofas, under which the clients’ flowers lie, and the ornamental anguish that covers them with carpets and furs, awaken the memory of Matisse, of Iturrino, and his terror of emptiness. The portrait of Madame Robert Rey and her daughter Sylvie, somewhere brings us back to that of Miró by Balthus. That of Madame Pétridès, or that of Charles Wakefield-Mori, both very German, point towards the new European realisms. In fabrics like The two sister’s (1928), Catherine on a panther skin (1923), the Woman with white stockings (1924) or his extraordinary Self portrait in the mirror (1927), Suzanne Valadon is already a unique, unmistakable painter, in permanent restlessness.
This brave woman from Montmartre knew sacrifice, and not only in favor of her son; She got a small apartment for the elderly and hopeless Degas. She knew marital bitterness, abandonment and ruin, but also glory. She celebrated her success at major international exhibitions. The highest levels of government and art attended her funeral. The French State bought her works. One of them, perhaps the chest of the painting of her, The blue room (1923), summarizes her art with the elements of greatest symbolic eloquence: submerged in the tidal wave of a space motley occupied by printed fabrics, a fat woman who smokes, dressed entirely in incongruous clothes, with books within reach of rough hands. , is an antimuse, someone who is not a model for anything or anyone.
‘Suzanne Valadon. A modern epic’. MNAC. Barcelona. Until September 1st.
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