Suzanne Valadon, the anti-muse of Montmartre who surpassed her teachers

From making a living on the street to being recognized by Degas as “one of us.” It is the unusual, miraculous and epic journey, vital and artistic, of Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938), a woman with a difficult and dissipated life who went from being a model for the bohemian machirulos of Montmartre to becoming a respected and sought-after painter in the world. effervescent Paris the avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century. And to surpass, in many cases, her teachers.

His little-known work is gathered for the first time in Spain in ‘A Modern Epic’, the exhibition that the MNAC (National Museum of Art of Catalonia) dedicates to him until September 1, in collaboration with the Center Pompidou. It offers more than a hundred pieces, including oil paintings, drawings, engravings and sculptures. There is also documentary material that reveals Valadon’s paradoxical role in the Paris that forever changed the course of art between 1910 and 1930.

It includes works by French and Catalan contemporaries of Valadon – Casas, Rusiñol, Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec – that demonstrate the artistic wealth of the time along with the unusual rise of a creator of exceptional talent and sensitivity who earned the status of artist from the lumpen. to shine in all genres, from portraiture to nudes, through still life and landscape.

Painter, draftsman and engraver, Valadon was a marvel who had everything against her. At the age of fifteen she sought a life as a model in a world of macho men with a palette and brush, frequenters of brothels and absinthe drinkers. She posed nude for Renoir, Puvis de Chavannes, Toulouse-Lautrec, Utter, Steinlen, Wertheimer, Forain, Hynais, or Henner. She went from the stage to the easel, the brushes and the palette to do what she saw and absorbed in her workshops, and she amazed Edgar Degas. “You are one of us,” the painter told him, astonished when he saw the first charcoals that Valadon drew secretly between poses.

When she was 19, Toulouse-Lautrec renamed her. “You pose naked for old people, so you should be called Suzanne,” the distorted painter from Albi told her, evoking the biblical myth of Susanna and the old people. Marie-Clementine accepted the advice and the metamorphosis took place that turned the muse into an anti-muse, the chrysalis into the butterfly that fluttered to fill her canvases with life and color.

He would paint now iconic works such as ‘The Blue Room’ – an impressive oil painting from 1923 that closes the retrospective -, still lifes, odalisques, family portraits, twilight self-portraits, rarities such as ‘Black Venus’ and controversial oil paintings such as ‘The Summer’ or ‘Adam and Eva’, one of the first full male nudes that Valadon had to retouch with a fig leaf to be able to exhibit it at the Salon des Indépendants in 1920.

The nude is a common thread of the exhibition, which opens with ‘The Card Caster’. «In the nudes his contemporaries impose themselves on everyone. She escapes the stereotypical male and female gaze; “Because he has no training, he portrays women much more naturally,” highlights Eduard Vallés, head of collections at the MNAC and curator of the exhibition along with Philip Dennis Cae.

Acrobat

The daughter of a sixteen-year-old Swiss laundress and an unknown father, Valadon worked as a florist, waitress, greengrocer, and laundress. She was an acrobat in the circus and, after a fall, a sought-after model before being a painter. “She went from model to artist in a more than complicated environment, in a very masculinized world and among the pioneers of modernity,” explains Eduard Vallés, head of collections at the MNAC and curator of the exhibition together with Philip Dennis Cae.

“It was assumed that she could not be an artist because she had been a model, but she persisted until she wrote a brilliant chapter in the history of art for which she was not destined,” underlines Vallés about the crazy anti-muse-painter who walked through Montmartre with a bouquet of carrots and a goat that, it is said, he fed with his failed works.

She portrayed and fell in love with Erik Satie, an ineffable musician who was upset when she abandoned him. Satie dedicated ‘Vexations’ to him, a revenge on a staff that can be heard in the sample on a harmonium of the time, together. In 1882 her life crossed paths with that of the Catalan journalist Miquel Utrillo. Valadon had a son of an unknown father who took the journalist’s surname and became the painter Maurice Utrillo.

«I had great teachers. I kept the best of each one, of their teachings and examples. But I didn’t copy anyone. “I found myself, I made myself, and I said what I had to say,” Valadon boasted shortly before his death. Picasso, Braque and other great painters of the time attended his funeral. She left a formidable legacy of 500 canvases and 300 works on paper, but her figure and her work soon fell into cruel oblivion. Her sought-after works are today in the most important museums in the world, from the Parisian Pompidou to the New York MoMA to the Boston Fine Arts Museum.