Biographies

At five she came to Paris with her mother and lived in a slum near the Bastille square. At six she was already a washergirl and found it hard to eke out a livelihood. A few years later she went on to live in Montmartre with her mother and started to produce drawings with a piece of charcoal while her mother was out at work. Then she became an acrobat in a circus but after a few months she fell from a trapeze and was seriously injured.

It was after her recovery that she became a model for many artists at 20 working for Wertheimer, an academic painter, Puvis de Chavannes, Renoir and later Degas.
She once said that to represent her in his painting «The Dance in the City», Renoir had gone all through Paris to find a suitable pair of gloves for her tiny hands.
She also met all the famous painters of her time, notably Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who reportedly became one of her lovers and Van Gogh.

Then Degas discovered her drawings and induced her to start an artistic career while she gave birth during the Christmas night of 1883 to a son named Maurice, later better known as Utrillo. No one knows who was the father- the names of Toulouse-Lautrec and even Van Gogh have been suggested in recent years- though the boy's father was a certain Boissy, an obscure painter. Still, Maurice was acknowledged as the son of Utrillo, a Spanish writer who had published a biography on El Greco.

Maria Valadon, who preferred to be called Suzanne, rapidly experienced difficulties with her son who was suffering from some mental disorder and started to become addicted to wine at a young age.

In 1896, Suzanne married Paul Mousis, an exchange broker and lived in Paris and in nearby Pierrefitte. In 1909 she met André Utter, a young painter and went on to live with him. Thanks to Utter, she met several intellectuals such as André Salmon, Max Jacob, Pierre Mac Orlan and Apollinaire and in 1924 she managed to sign a contract with the Bernheim Jeune Gallery.

She took part in many exhibitions notably in 1894 at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and showed her works regularly at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants and had several solo exhibitions from 1911 until her death in 1938.

Many art historians have above all been interested in her sentimental life and in her relations with Maurice Utrillo while art critics during her lifetime only paid attention to her works after 1911.

In fact she learned to paint while she was a model and her pastel self-portrait of 1883 seems to be her first known work. She produced many nudes and scenes with a firm and subtle touch, mainly crayon, charcoal and red chalk drawings and started to paint in 1903, large female nudes in sober interiors.

Her true master was Degas who inspired her much when she painted nudes and interior scenes. Her meeting with Utter made her modify her style. In addition, her lover encouraged her to produce more paintings. Between 1883 and 1909 she had only painted 20 canvasses whereas she produced 450 oil paintings between 1909 and 1938.

Being the first woman to be admitted at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1894 she was among the first female painters to concentrate on the representation of the pleasure of love. In 1909 her painting «Adam and Eve» exhibited at the Paris Salon induced censors to demand that the penis of Adam (André Utter was her model) should be covered while «la Joie de Vivre» of 1911 and the «lancement du Filet» of 1914 were among her most evocative paintings regarding such theme.

Suzanne Valadon was above all the painter of female nudes showing women in all postures without any complacency. In 1913 she also started to paint genre scenes with several human figures. Between 1918 and until her death she varied her themes, painting a series of nudes and women bathers around 1923, landscapes near Lyons and still lifes around 1927 as well as portrait, her last self-portrait dating from 1931. Critics then said that her works appeared more masculine than those produced by many men.