Suzanne Valadon

Suzanne Valadon was born Marie-Clémentine Valadon in Bessines-sur-Gartempe, France, in 1865, the illegitimate daughter of a seamstress. She came to Paris in her teens, worked as a circus acrobat until a fall ended that career, and began modeling for the artists of Montmartre — Puvis de Chavannes, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas. She taught herself to draw, partly by watching the men she posed for, partly by sheer determination. Degas, who saw her drawings, was astonished and became her mentor. She was the first woman admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She gave birth to a son in 1883 — Maurice Utrillo, who would become a celebrated painter himself, though he struggled with alcoholism throughout his life. What she brought to painting that no one else had was the knowledge of what it felt like to be on the other side of the looking. She had stood on the platform while men walked around her with charcoal. When she painted women, she painted their experience of being in a body rather than the experience of looking at one. Her nudes have body hair, irregular proportions, the comfort of unselfconsciousness. They are women who would not notice you if you walked in. She also painted male nudes — frequently, and with the same frank attention she gave her female subjects. Men in bathtubs. Men reclining. Men who are simply present rather than heroic. The equal treatment was itself radical: the male body subjected to the same looking that women's bodies had endured for centuries. She painted until her death in 1938 at seventy-three. She is buried in the Saint-Ouen Cemetery in Paris.

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