“Un monde à soi” (A World of Her Own), curated by the director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Chiara Parisi, is Suzanne Valadon’s first retrospective in France in nearly sixty years. The title of the show, which will travel to the Musée d’Arts de Nantes and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, evokes Virginia Woolf, who published her great essay A Room of One’s Own in 1929, just a few years after Valadon (1865–1938) painted her self-portrait in La chambre bleue (The Blue Room), 1923. The large-scale canvas is now in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Limoges, the provincial French city Valadon left as a girl with her mother at the tail end of the nineteenth century, destination Paris. In this painting, the self-taught artist reclines in striped-silk pajamas, an unlit cigarette dangling defiantly from her lips. Instead of that black cat posed at the slippered feet of Édouard Manet’s Olympia, 1863, two books rest on the edge of Valadon’s plush bedspread. Her feet are proudly bare, each toe outlined in the artist’s signature black line. After growing up in others’ worlds, Valadon here presents a vision of herself fully inhabiting her own.
Valadon was a performer at heart (it had been her dream to become an acrobat). Some say it was as a model in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Montmartre studio that Valadon became a voracious reader, and that it was he who noticed her sketches, encouraging her to present them to Edgar Degas. Valadon’s meeting with Degas was the moment she transgressed her gender and her class. From him, Valadon learned the technique of gravure. The sharp lines of the numerous prints displayed here limn intimate domestic scenes: a grandmother bathing her young grandson, an adolescent girl peering into a mirror.
The grand-scale canvas Adam and Eve, 1909, is the artist’s self-portrait with André Utter. The young man was a painter, a friend of her son, and she had fallen in love with both him and his art. This work, a knowing study of knees and elbows, proudly attests to the couple’s romantic relationship and to her own artistic mastery. Her Eve smiles as she plucks an apple from the tree that nearly embraces the couple with its green branches. Her fingertips peek around Adam’s waist and clasp the hand he rests on his hip. Valadon shadows the nearly life-size pair’s bare skin in green, which makes the laurel leaves she was obligated to paint over the man’s genitals in order to show the canvas in the 1920 Salon d’Automne seem less of a violation of the artist’s masterly work than a kind of blossoming. Valadon’s vegetal sublimation of the body is echoed in the coat of green leaves that Ali Smith writes as a refuge for her dying character in the opening pages of her novel Autumn (2016). Both artists imagine the metamorphosis of human to plant. No wonder Valadon’s still lifes, with their decadent bouquets and vibrant bowls of fruit, and her lush forest landscapes took center stage in this exhibition.
Hung salon style on a wide expanse of lilac-colored wall, as if to frame the exhibition, were the society portraits Valadon continued to produce throughout her career. She had to. Caring for herself and her alcoholic son, Maurice Utrillo, who would outshine her in his early renown as a painter, Valadon never stopped being a mother. That’s a life’s work, too, and it does not negate a creative practice. Nor should it be ignored in the evaluation of one. Valadon shared her canvases with her own mother, her lovers, and her son. Ultimately, though, as in her Autoportrait aux seins nus (Self-Portrait with Bare Breasts), 1931, which graces the cover of the exhibition catalogue, she sits most proudly alone.
