Suzanne Valadon in the Flesh

There's much to admire about Suzanne Valadon, a very individual, hard-to-categorise painter who truly blazed a trail for women artists in the first half of the 20th century. But could you live with her brutal, unrelenting works on your wall? 

One of the pictures that first greets you in the Suzanne Valadon retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris is this one -- The Blue Room -- and it certainly slaps you in the face. 

Valadon takes the tradition of the odalisque and turns it on its head. You've seen those nude women stretched out on a couch painted by men -- by Titian, by Goya, by Ingres and by Manet, but what about Valadon's version? It's not erotic, by any means. Her model is a bit more solidly built than most, and she's wearing a pair of stripy pyjama bottoms. Fag in mouth, she's also got a yellow paperback novel on the go. Could you imagine a man painting this in the early part of the 20th century? Could you imagine an English woman artist like Laura Knight doing the same? 

Valadon, the daughter of a Montmartre washerwoman and an unknown father, had been a model herself, posing from the age of 14, so if anyone had a right to reinterpret the rules of the game, she had. Here she is, depicted by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, with whom she had a tempestuous affair. 

It's called La Grosse Marie -- that's Big Marie, if not Fat Marie -- and it's possibly not the most flattering of paintings itself. Why Marie? Valadon's real name was Marie-Clémentine, and Toulouse-Lautrec is said to have suggested she should change her name to Suzanne -- the French form of Susanna -- because she posed naked for old men, as in that favourite titillating Biblical theme, Susanna and the Elders. 

"You have to be hard on yourself, have a conscience, look yourself in the face," Valadon said, and that quote certainly seems to sum up her approach. 

Take a look at Family Portraits, a pre-World War I picture in which Valadon is surrounded by her then lover and later husband, the model and painter André Utter, who was also her manager (he's at the back left), and her troubled son Maurice Utrillo (in the foreground, a friend of Utter and actually older than him; and also a painter). Oh, and by her unsparingly depicted mother Madeleine, who looks as worn-out and wrinkly as this in other paintings too. 

Valadon certainly manages to mix some rather acidic colours. The green tinge to this yellow background provides a rather sour note to this picture in which each family member seems somehow to be absorbed in their own separate world. The home and studio where the family lived and worked is now part of the Musée de Montmartre, not far from the Sacré-Coeur church that's so prominent on the northern skyline from the Pompidou's exterior escalators.  

Valadon seems to have made a speciality of oddly dissonant, uncomfortable portraits of couples and groups. Unhappy families, you might think, rightly or wrongly. There's one of Utter's mother and sisters, again not interacting with each other, and then two of Valadon's niece, Marie Coca, and her daughter, Gilberte. 

In this first painting, made in 1913, the connection between mother and child seems to be disrupted by all the different diagonals and strange angles. The figures are turned in opposite directions, emphasised by their dark footwear, and out of line with the chair which faces us directly. The cropped picture frame behind the chair adds to the angularity. The mother looks away from the child, who in turn does not play with the doll but presses down firmly on its head. The floorboards are particularly disconcerting, with the central boards that ought to guide your eyes to the protagonists abruptly cut by the cushion. 

And there's more to come. Mother and daughter reappear eight years later. Gilberte has now reached puberty, and Marie is drying her after a bath. The doll lies abandoned on the ground, with Gilberte preferring to stare at her reflection in a handheld mirror. Again, it's full of awkward poses, garish colours and disturbing patterns.

Towards the end of this show, it's the nudes that predominate. If Valadon is best known for anything in particular, its her nudes, and there are lots of them in the Pompidou. Lots. And not just female, for she was one of the first women artists to paint male nudes. In 1909, she portrayed herself and her lover, Utter, as Adam and Eve, naked in the Garden of Eden. She had to cover André up with a string of vine leaves -- yes, it's vine leaves in French, fig leaves in English -- to exhibit the painting after the war. Utter appears again in three poses as a naked fisherman in Casting the Net, but the public's blushes were spared by some strategically positioned rope.

Standing out from the mass of bare white skin on show is Valadon's Black Venus, though that doesn't seem to be the work's original title. It's a more restrained piece than many, a goddess, or probably not, in a sylvan setting, who just happens to be black.

But that's not really the full Valadon effect, which is really rather one of strange poses, clashing fabrics, the slightly outrageous. Such as Catherine Naked Lying on a Panther Skin, which brings us Valadon's maid, foreshortened, squeezed as it were into an awkward angle atop a mishmash of rugs, throws and covers scattered across the floorboards. And as much colour as possible. 

We'd not seen a lot of Suzanne Valadon before -- there's not a single painting by her in a British public collection -- and so while we found this comprehensive show intriguing and informative, we thought it could have done with a little judicious editing; we flagged a bit towards the end, feeling that too many of the portraits and the nudes on the walls were repetitions on the same theme. But if you want to know what sets Valadon apart, you really need to see her in the flesh.

Practicalities

Suzanne Valadon is on at the Pompidou Centre in Paris until May 26. It's open daily except Tuesdays, from 1100 to 2100, and even later on Thursdays, until 2300. The exhibition is also shut on May 1. Full-price tickets are 17 euros, and booking is strongly recommended; you can buy tickets here. We spent about 90 minutes in this exhibition. Note that large parts of the Pompidou, including the permanent collection, are already shut to the public ahead of a major renovation project starting later this year. The venue could hardly be more centrally located; the RER suburban-rail interchange at Châtelet Les Halles and Châtelet, Hôtel de Ville and Rambuteau stations on various lines of the Metro are all within a few minutes walk.  

Images

Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938), The Blue Room, 1923, Centre Pompidou, Paris 
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), La Grosse Marie, 1884, Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal
Suzanne Valadon, Family Portraits, 1912, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Suzanne Valadon, Marie Coca and her Daughter Gilberte, 1913, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon
Suzanne Valadon, The Abandoned Doll, 1921, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC
Suzanne Valadon, Black Venus, 1919, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Suzanne Valadon, Catherine Naked Lying on a Panther Skin, 1923, Lucien Arkas Collection