Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) was named after Toulouse-Lautrec, one of the many painter lovers for whom she posed as a teenager. “Since you are always naked surrounded by old men, you should be called Suzanne,” like the young girl in the Bible story who is abused by the lustful eyes of two old men. But while she was painted by Renoir, Puvis de Chavannes, Degas…, Valadon observed and learned, until she became an artist herself, painting extraordinary female nudes, strong and carnal women, unconcerned with seducing but aware of their own desire. sexual of her. Free and completely master of her life and her brushes, she triumphed against all odds, she sold enough to buy a castle on the outskirts of Paris and her funeral was attended by the greatest, Picasso, Braque, Derain… But over time His art was diminished, overshadowed by his son, Maurice Utrillo, and obscured by rampant misogyny, despite the fact that his work is present in the most important museums in the world, from the Pompidou to the Metropolitan in New York.
“He had all the losing cards but he played them so well that he ended up winning,” says Eduard Vallès in front of The Future Revealed, also known as The Card Caster, the painting that opens the exciting exhibition A Modern Epic, with which the MNAC presents for the first time in Spain (until September 1) to the sensational French painter. “Her story should never have been written,” Vallès insists. “A very, very poor woman, daughter of a single mother who makes a living in Montmatre and who at the age of 15 began modeling for painters, a profession that was associated with prostitution, and who despite everything manages to make her way and be respected in a man’s world where there was also fierce competition.”
At the end of the tour, almost like a manifesto of the anti-model, we find his masterpiece, The Blue Room, in which Valadon short-circuits the tradition of the odalisque in French art, from Manet to Ingres or Matisse. Hers, generous in flesh, is not naked for the delight of men, she rests relaxed on a blue blanket with an ivy print, comfortable with herself and her obvious bohemianism, an unlit cigarette in her mouth, modern striped pants and some books at the foot of the couch. She is a free and real woman.
“She herself offered very different versions of her life, so we will never know the absolute truth,” warns Vallès, curator of the exhibition together with Philip-Dennis Cate, from the Center Pompidou-Metz, partner of an international production in which The Musée d’Art of Nantes has also participated. The daughter of a single mother, Valadon worked as a florist, dishwasher, nanny, laundress, waitress and acrobat in a circus until an injury forced her to get off the trapeze.
At the age of 18 she gave birth to a son, to whom her friend Miguel Utrillo would later give her last name, after what came to be called “the seven years war”, the time in which the blue-eyed painter It took him a while to convince him. In the painting Encampaign, Rusiñol portrayed the couple in a Montmatre under construction, he dressed in the uniform of Erik Satie, who had the only romantic relationship of his life with Valadon. After their breakup, the jealous musician composed Vexations (Vexations), a complex score with a single motif that demands to be played non-stop 840 times in a row.
In the rooms of the MNAC, decorated with photographs and scenographic elements that evoke the Paris of the Belle Époque, the notes sound incessantly on an old harmonium. The exhibition, which comes ahead of the one that the Pompidou will dedicate to it in January 2025, is being an unexpected success. Word of mouth caused 6,000 people to pass through its rooms last weekend. It’s very worth it. Valadon did not pick up a paintbrush until 1909, at age 44, when she left her husband, a businessman, for the painter André Utter, a friend of her son, who was twice her age. She was portrayed next to him in Adam and Eve, she triumphantly rejuvenated, he completely naked (it is considered the first male nude done by a woman). Eleven years later, to exhibit it at the Salon des Indépendants, she had to add a loincloth made of vine leaves.
