When Suzanne Valadon revolutionized the naked – L’Express

“You have to be hard with yourself, have a conscience, look in front.” These words of Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) could summarize, on their own, her journey: model of the whole-Montmartre, painter and designer without concession, single mother and uninhibited lover. Oddly, this artist as free as it is bold, celebrated by her peers during her lifetime, did not remain in posterity as a leading figure. The situation may be changing since the last two years, a major exhibition around his work has circulated from Metz to Barcelona via Nantes. Today, the Pompidou centerin Paris, offers an enriched version in what will remain the first Parisian monograph dedicated to Valadon since 1967. The opportunity to highlight its precursor role, often underestimated, in the artistic modernity in the turn of the turn of the century, and D ‘Expand the subject by deciphering his graphic work through a number of drawings rarely shown.

Marie Clémentine Valadon, by her baptismal name, very early on the conventions of her time. Natural girl of a laundress with which she lives in the heart of the Bohemian Montmartroise, she poses, from the age of 14, under the nickname of Maria, for masters installed such as Renoir, a time her lover, Puvis de Chavannes or Toulouse-Lautrec. The latter, with which she has a fiery bond, renamed it Suzanne in reference to the innocent seductive of old men from the Bible.

Tireless observer, the model makes its artist ranges while watching painters work. His sketches enchant Degas-“You are ours!”, He exclaims, before opening the doors of his workshop. She does not pose for him but he helps him to perfect these “bad and flexible” drawings whose criticism will praise or castigate “harshness” and “brutality male”. The supported line from which she surrounds the bodies becomes her trademark, and The blue room From 1923, her queen work.

Too poor to pay models, Suzanne Valadon first portrait the members of her clan, which we find together in the famous Family portrait from 1912: his old mother Madeleine; her son Maurice, whom she had at 18 and to whom the Catalan engineer Miquel Utrillo, a putative father among others, gave his name; her long -term lover André Utter; herself in assumed tribe head. André, who is twenty-five years younger than her, is at the center of his nude corpus, like of Adam and Evepainted in 1909, one of the first paintings of a woman artist representing a man from the front with his genitals offered to the gaze. Subsequently, it will cover the object of the offense of a vine sheet to make the canvas accepted at the Independents Salon of 1920.

In an assumed libertarian vein, his last work as a male nude, the Launch of the net (1914), which earned him to be treated as “old slut” by the columnist Arthur Cravan, sees the athletic body of Utter being deployed in three dimensions without any biblical or mythological reference coming to legitimize nudity. Unheard of! The female nudes of the Valadon will also mark a break: they without complacency the daily life, sometimes tedious, of those which, far from being idealized, are no longer represented here for the desire of a voyeur spectator.

“Suzanne Valadon” exhibition In the Pompidou Center (Paris), until May 26.