From the May 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Suzanne Valadon’s name testifies to her early status as an object to be looked at. Born Marie-Clémentine, she was purportedly dubbed ‘Suzanne’ by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec during her years as a model. It was an off-colour joke – a reference to the Old Testament tale in which two men spy on the beautiful Susanna as she bathes, then attempt to blackmail her into sex. A racy subject wrapped in a moral fable, Susanna and the Elders had been popular with artists since the 15th century. When Valadon met Toulouse-Lautrec in the mid 1880s, she had modelled for Auguste Renoir, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Gustav Wertheimer, calling herself ‘Maria’. Toulouse-Lautrec suggested ‘Susanna’ was a more apt name, because she spent so much of her life nude, being ogled by old men.
Valadon turned the joke on its head, adopting ‘Suzanne’ as her artistic pseudonym, leaving her identity as a model behind with the name Maria. She had a flair for self-invention. Her mother had been a domestic servant supporting two daughters born out of wedlock. As a child, Valadon worked in the circus, but she left after a trapeze accident and started modelling when she was 15 or 16. She spun a different story for Renoir, telling him she was the daughter of a wealthy family that lost its fortune. Others were told that she had been abandoned as a baby in the porch of Limoges cathedral. Her self-invention as Suzanne was more necessary than fanciful – as Maria the model she had struggled to be taken seriously.
The Two Sisters (1928), Suzanne Valadon. Private collection. Photo: © Matthew Hollow
Valadon’s early life and class background had a striking effect on her art, visible in the intimate attention she afforded working women – among them a younger generation of models. Seeded between spirited bourgeois portraits and capable still lifes is a body of work with exceptional focus on women at rest. Their bodies are heavy, spilling across their surroundings, mattresses bowing to their weight. They slump with plausible fatigue. Sometimes they are clothed, often they are not. Although these women are complicit in the creation of the paintings, they are seldom ‘on display’ – they don’t invite us to look at them, they are simply there, lost in thought or conversation. It is this quality in particular that makes Valadon’s work feel enticingly modern.
In The Blue Bedroom (1923), a dark-haired woman in striped pyjama bottoms and a shell-pink camisole lounges with a cigarette beside a small pile of books. Framed by a canopy of ivy-print cloth, she is the picture of lush repose: rounded, supported and at ease. All she needs is someone to lean in with a cigarette lighter. We’re not looking at her through a lover’s eyes, but a friend’s or a flatmate’s. A century after she was painted, she might be glimpsed through an apartment window in New York, London or Paris, chilling after a tough week. This is bohemian bed rotting. This is Montmartre gone goblin mode. This is aspirational.
The Blue Bedroom (1923), Suzanne Valadon. Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photo: Jacqueline Hyde/Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Dist. Grand Palais Rmn
As a model, Valadon performed dramatic types. For Toulouse-Lautrec she was a Woman Pulling up Her Stocking (1894). For Puvis de Chavannes she was all three bathers in Young Women Beside the Sea (c.1879). For Wertheimer she was a siren, tempting sailors to a watery death; for Renoir, a girl pinning her hair at the mirror. The access each gives to Valadon’s naked or part-dressed body casts the painter in the role of lover (as, indeed, some were). The very fact of our presence as she pulls on a stocking or combs her hair suggests a deeper level of intimacy, explicit details of which are left to the imagination.
Valadon was, to a degree, the product of her milieu and on occasion she, too, positioned her models in dramatic tableaux. In the monumental Joy of Life (1911), four women are discovered drying themselves in a clearing beside a lake, watched over by a naked man whose muscular rear was modelled on André Utter, Valadon’s young lover. Utter was also the model for the ambitious Casting the Net (1914), for which he appears in triplicate as a group of naked fishermen throwing a net from a riverbank. Distractingly, the position of the ropes does not correspond to that of the fishermen’s hands: I assume Valadon had to repaint it to conceal the penis of one of the figures. There had been a violent response to the work, with a critic describing Valadon as a vieille salope (old slut).
Joy of Life (1911), Suzanne Valadon. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Dist. Grand Palais Rmn
To say that Valadon paints as a woman among women is not to suggest that she strips her female nudes of sexuality. A suite of uncanny paintings addresses the fascination of young girls with their maturing bodies. Two appear bewitched with their faces in a hand mirror, while a third twists to catch a reflection of her bottom. A pair of grown-up sisters in slumped stockings look primed for conspiratorial naughtiness. If anything, the sexual charge is enhanced by the weighty realism of these women’s presence. In the magnificent Catherine Lying Nude on a Leopard Skin (1923) a dramatically foreshortened body is viewed from the feet, with a zigzag journey up the legs leading irresistibly to the cleft at the top of her thighs. Catherine stares back sleepily from beneath lowered lids, with a pout that is more petulant than seductive. The leopard skin accentuates the feline power of her sexuality: it is a tool at her command, to be deployed for her own pleasure. But not now, thank you. Now she needs to rest.
Catherine Lying Nude on a Leopard Skin (1923), Suzanne Valadon. Lucien Arkas Collection Photo: © Hadiye Cangokce
From the May 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.