December Monthly Challenge

Suzanne Valadon (23 September 1865 – 7 April 1938) was a French painter and artists’ model who was born Marie-Clémentine Valadon at Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute-Vienne, France. In 1894, Valadon became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She was also the mother of painter Maurice Utrillo. The subjects of her drawings and paintings included mostly female nudes, female portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. She never attended the academy and was never confined to a tradition. Valadon spent nearly 40 years of her life as an artist.

Valadon primarily worked with oil paint, oil pencils, pastels, and red chalk; she did not use ink or watercolor because these media were too fluid for her preference. Valadon’s paintings feature rich colors and bold, open brushwork often featuring firm black lines to define and outline her figures. She used hard black lines to emphasize the structure of the body. She also used firm lines in her nudes to emphasize the play of light on curves.
Valadon’s self-portraits, portraits, nudes, landscapes, and still lifes remain detached from trends and aspects of academic art. The subjects of Valadon’s paintings often reinvent the old masters’ themes: women bathing, reclining nudes, and interior scenes. However, the nudes Valadon paints veer far from the norms of this male-dominated genre; the paintings are interpreted in a much different way which could contradict or question the nature of the genre. Many have suggested a vibrant, emotional sense that emanates from her drawings and paintings as a result of an intimate, familiar observation of these women’s bodies. Similarly to Valadon, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt painted mostly women, yet because of their middle-class status in French society at the time they were unable to paint the nude body, regardless of gender. Valadon also emphasized her focus on the importance of the composition of her portraits over painting expressive eyes. Her later works are brighter in color and show a new emphasis on decorative backgrounds and patterned materials.

It’s thought that her experience as a model and as an artist allowed her to analyze the process that transformed and positioned the body as an object of the gaze within a work of art and influenced her understanding and perspective of women and the female body. Valadon has been considered transgressive in her position as a woman painting the nude female body. Her class allowed her to enter the male public domain of art through modeling and then emerge as an artist within her circle of prominent male artists. She resists typical depictions of women via their class and supposed sexuality through her use of unidealized and self-possessed bodies that are not overly sexualized.