Background

Valadon was born in Bessines-sur-Gartempe, France, on September 23, 1865. She was raised in poverty by her mother Madeleine Valadon, an unmarried laundress. Valadon did not know her father.

Education

At the age of five, Suzanne Valadon moved to Paris with her mother. For a couple of years, she attended a convent school. Valadon was a self-taught artist. She helped to educate herself in art by reading Toulouse-Lautrec’s books as well as observing the artists at work for whom she posed as a model.

Career

Valadon started to work at age 11, taking a job in a milliner's workshop. Valadon also worked as a funeral wreath maker, a vegetable seller, and a waitress. When Valadon was a teenager, she befriended some painters, who lived in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, a bustling artist's community. Among them were Count Antoine de la Rochefoucauld and Thèo Wagner. These artists helped Valadon get a job as an acrobat at the Mollier circus, as they were involved in decorating circus belonging to Medrano. Here, artist Berthe Morisot painted the young Valadon as a tightrope walker.

In March of 1880, Suzanne Valadon fell from a trapeze while practicing her act and injured her back. After several weeks she managed to recover but was unable to perform in a circus for the rest of her life. However, her brief experience with the circus remained one of her fondest memories.

At the age of 15, she caught the eye of painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and debuted as a model in Montmartre. She modeled for over 10 years for many different artists including Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, Jean-Jacques Henner, Théophile Steinlen Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Some of the more notable paintings featuring Valadon included Puvis's 1884-1886 piece Sacred Wood and Toulouse-Lautrec's 1889 The Hangover. Valadon modeled under the name "Maria", eventually nicknamed "Suzanne" by Toulouse-Lautrec.

First known artworks created by Suzanne Valadon, a pastel called Self-Portrait and a drawing of her mother called The Grandmother, were produced in 1883. During the mid- and late-1880s, she created many drawings and pastels of people and of street scenes. Her artistic endeavors were assisted by Toulouse-Lautrec. It is believed that Valadon's experience as a model added depth to her own images of nude women, which tended to be less idealized than that of the male post-impressionists representations.

In the early 1890s, she became friends with Edgar Degas. After seeing some of Valadon's work, he was impressed with her bold line drawings and fine paintings, encouraged her efforts to become an artist, buying some of her pieces and helping her get her career started. She remained one of his closest friends until his death. Due to encouragement from Degas, Valadon became the first woman to exhibit at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, a major French artistic accomplishment, which took place in 1894.

All of Suzanne Valadon's early artworks were drawings executed in pastel or pencil. In the early 1890s, she started to work in oils, producing her first paintings. One of these first oils, dating from 1893, was of composer Erik Satie. In 1896 Valadon quitted modeling and dedicated herself to drawing and painting full-time. Valadon was not limited to any particular style, yet both Symbolist and Post-Impressionist aesthetics are clearly seen in her works.

Valadon's unique style became more obvious once she had the freedom to practice her craft released from financial concerns due to her marriage. Because Valadon didn't have formal training, she approached art with a different perspective than the other artists of her time.

In the late 1890s, Valadon executed less work of artistic value. She made only a few sales, primarily to her fellow artists. Nevertheless, two of her engravings appeared at a large London exhibit organized by the International Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers in 1898. However, in the following years she neglected her artistic career because of problems with her son.

In 1906 Valadon met a friend of her son, Andre Utter, who was himself a young painter. Inspired by Utter, Valadon returned more seriously to her art, creating a considerable number of paintings for the first time in years. Among these artworks were Summer, After the Bath, and Adam and Eve. This last painting, modeled on Valadon and Andre Utter, was the first piece produced by a female painter to depict a nude man and woman together.

Suzanne Valadon executed her first landscape as well as her first nude self-portrait in 1910. However, Valadon was beginning to be overshadowed by her artist son and his contemporaries, including Picasso. Over the next few years, Valadon, her lover Andre Utter, and her son lived together in the Montmartre on the earnings of their artwork.

When World War I erupted in 1914, Utter volunteered for military service. He and Valadon married so that she could receive an allowance from the military as a soldier's wife.

Starting from 1915, Valadon painted little due to her mother's death and her son's mental problems. However, among the works she created during this time was a portrait of Mauricia Coquiot, wife of an art critic and dealer. Suzanne Valadon's first solo exhibition also took place in 1915, although the show produced practically no sales. The following year Valadon commenced a series of paintings using a young model with whom she tried to arrange a marriage for her son. Although her expectations were not met, she produced many drawings using the young model.

In 1917 Utter received a bullet wound and Valadon moved to the country to be closer to him. She lived on the suburbs of Paris for some time, painting landscapes. When the war was over in 1918, both Utter and Valadon returned to the city. Utter marketed his artworks, as well as those of Valadon and Maurice Utrillo, most successfully those of the latter.

However, Valadon had reached her peak as an artist at that time. She executed paintings and drawings at a fast pace, and in 1920 was invited to show her art pieces at the Salon d'Automne. For the remainder of her career, Suzanne Valadon would show frequently to critical acclaim but had only moderate sales. The increasingly unstable son's artworks commercially overshadowed those of his mother.

Suzanne Valadon signed a contract with the art gallery Bernheim-Jeune in 1924. It enabled her to live again in financial comfort. She bought a country estate called Saint-Bernard, where she spent much of her time. Valadon continued to produce paintings, showing at a major retrospective in 1929. Many of Valadon's works from this period depicted her beloved pets. Another major retrospective of her artworks took place in 1932.

Through the 1930s Valadon's health worsened. In 1935 she entered the hospital for complications of diabetes and kidney dysfunction. The same year, her son married and left his mother's home, while Utter also moved out. In 1937 the well-established Musée du Luxembourg purchased three of her major paintings as well as many of Valadon's drawings. On April 7, 1938, Valadon was painting at her easel when she unexpectedly suffered a stroke and died at the hospital just hours later.

Achievements

• 

  Suzanne Valadon was a remarkable and extremely prolific painter. A complete survey of her work totals over 475 paintings, nearly 275 drawings, and 31 etchings. Her most famous paintings are "Summer", "After the Bath", and "Adam and Eve".
  
  Due to her sensitive observation mixed with bold linework and patterns, she received much acclaim. She exhibited frequently and in the 1920s and 1930s became internationally known.
  
  In the latter part of the 20th century, increasing interest in the artworks of women artists such as Valadon led to an increased appreciation of her life, art, and contributions. Her body of work has been of great interest to feminist art historians, especially given her focus on the female form.
  
  A novel based on Valadon's life was written by Elaine Todd Koren and published in 2001. It was entitled "Suzanne: of Love and Art". One more novel by Sarah Baylis, entitled "Utrillo's Mother", came out first in England and later in the United States. The Line (2009), Timberlake Wertenbaker's play, traces the relationship between Suzanne Valadon and Edgar Degas. Valadon was the basis for the character Suzanne Rouvier in the novel by W. Somerset Maugham entitled "The Razor's Edge".
  
  Both an asteroid (6937 Valadon) and a crater on Venus are named in her honour. To commemorate her achievements, the small square at the base of the Montmartre funicular in Paris was named Place Suzanne Valadon.
  
  Nowadays, her works are exhibited in many of the finest museums and galleries throughout the world, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Grenoble, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Study of a cat

  • Nude at the Mirror

  • Nude with a Striped Blanket

  • My Son

  • Raminou sitting on a cloth

  • View from My Window in Genets (Brittany)

  • After the bath

  • Bouquet of flowers

  • Miss Lily Walton

  • The Blue Room

  • Still life

  • Portrait of Erik Satie

  • The Bath

  • Portrait of Monsieur Mori

  • Woman with a Double Bass

  • Nude Getting into the Bath beside the Seated Grandmother

  • Portrait of a Woman

  • Nudes

  • Woman Preparing for a Bath

  • Self-Portrait

  • Self-Portrait

  • Geneviève Camax-Zoegger

  • Maria Lani

  • Two cats

  • Farm Montcorin

  • The Cast-Off Doll

  • Flower vase on a round table

  • Portrait of Marie Coca and her Daughter

  • Reclining nude

  • Nude Reclining on a Sofa

  • Utrillo Nude Sitting on a Couch

  • Casting the Net

  • Self-Portrait

  • Raminou and pitcher with carnations

  • Bouquet and a Cat

  • Self-Portrait

  • Women in white stockings

  • Portrait of Maurice Utrillo

  • My Utrillo at the Age of Nine

  • Nude Woman with Drapery

  • Woman Looking at Herself in the Mirror

  • Maurice Utrillo Playing with a Sling Shot

  • Louison and Raminou

  • Andre Utter and His Dogs

  • The Two Bathers

  • Nude on the sofa

  • Femme a la Toilette

  • Mother and Daughter After the Bath II

  • Adam and Eve

  • Female Nude, washing herself

  • Roses in a Vase

Views

Quotations: "I had great masters. I took the best of them of their teachings, of their examples. I found myself, I made myself, and I said what I had to say."

"I paint people to learn to know them."

"I paint with the stubbornness I need for living, and I've found that all painters who love their art do the same."

Personality

Suzanne Valadon was considered a very focused, ambitious, determined, rebellious, self-confident, as well as a passionate woman. In the 1920s and 1930s, she became increasingly obsessed by the loss of her youthful beauty. For years, she had hidden her exact age from people.

Connections

In 1881 Suzanne Valadon began a relationship with Spaniard Miguel Utrillo. On December 26, 1883, aged 18, Valadon gave birth to her son, Maurice Utrillo, who later became a renowned painter in his own right. Suzanne Valadon herself was uncertain of who the father of her child was. Miguel Utrillo would later sign papers recognizing Maurice as his son. However, several other possible fathers have been suggested, including Puvis, Renoir, and another young Paris artist named Boissy. Her mother cared for the child while Suzanne Valadon returned to modelling.

In 1893 Valadon had an intense though short-lived romantic involvement with composer Erik Satie, moving to a room next to his on the Rue Cortot. Satie became obsessed with her, calling her his Biqui, writing impassioned notes about "her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet." Satie proposed to Valadon, but she turned him down, leaving him devastated.

After the affair with Satie ended, Suzanne Valadon's involvement with Montmartre stockbroker Paul Mousis intensified. They eventually married in 1896. This marriage provided Valadon with financial stability and she was able to lead a bourgeois life for 13 years at an apartment in Paris and a house in the outlying region.

In 1906 Valadon met a young painter, Andre Utter, who was a friend of her son. In 1909 the two began an affair. Valadon was by then 44 to Utter's 23. She at first tried to hide it from her husband. But she became careless and Paul Mousis found it out, breaking off the marriage. They officially divorced in March of 1910.

They married in 1914. By the end of the 1920s, Andre Utter had taken up drinking and cheating on her. As a result, the couple divorced in 1934.

Spouse:

Paul Mousis

Spouse:

Andre Utter

André Utter (1886-1948) was a French painter.

life partner:

Miguel Utrillo y Molins

Miguel Utrillo y Molins (1862-1934) was an engineer, painter, decorator, and art critic. He was one of the artistic directors of the Universal Exhibition of Barcelona in 1929.

Son:

Maurice Utrillo

Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955), born Maurice Valadon, was a French artist who specialized in cityscapes.

life partner:

Erik Satie

Éric Alfred Leslie Satie (1866-1925), or Erik Satie, was a French composer and pianist.

Friend:

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) was a French artist, who was renowned for his paintings, sculptures, prints, and also drawings.

colleague:

Georges Braque

Georges Braque (1882-1963) was a French painter of the 20th century Art. Along with Picasso and Juan Gris, he played a great role in the development of Cubism.

colleague:

André Derain

André Derain (1880-1954) was a French painter, sculptor as well as a co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.

colleague:

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish-French painter, sculptor, ceramicist, stage designer, printmaker, poet, and playwright; one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, known for co-founding the Cubist movement.

References

• Renoir's Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon Renoir’s Dancer tells the remarkable tale of an ambitious, headstrong woman fighting to find a professional voice in a male-dominated world.
  2017
• Suzanne Valadon: The Mistress of Montmartre A portrait of the artists who created the Montmartre era of art history chronicles the unconventional life of Maurice Utrillo's mother, a fine artist in her own right, who was also the lover of Renoir, Erik Satie, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others.
  1998
• Suzanne Valadon Gathers sketches, nudes, still lifes, and landscapes by the French artist, whose son, Utrillo, also became a painter.
  1985
• 50 Color Paintings of Suzanne Valadon Suzanne Valadon book includes 50 high quality reproductions of her greatest masterpieces with title and date.
  2012
• Suzanne: of Love and Art Novel by Elaine Todd.
  1995
• The Valadon Drama: The Life of Suzanne Valadon A full and dramatic biography of a woman, her son, and the rich if confused climate which nurtured them.
  1958