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1865/67 - 1938 • French • Painter • Post-Impressionist
"I paint people to learn to know them." - Suzanne Valadon
The daughter of an unmarried domestic worker, Valadon was roaming the streets of Montmartre by the age of six and in her teens posed for PUVIS DE CHAVANNEST, OULOUSE-LAUTREC and RENOIR. She had no art lessons, but taught herself to draw by watching the artists who painted her. Her talent was recognized and she enjoyed a certain level of critical acclaim from 1921 until her death. Like the men with whom she associated on both a professional and an informal basis, and unlike her female contemporaries MORISOT and CASSATT, Valadon painted numerous female nudes. Breaking the rules of propriety and invading what was then considered male terrain, she defied restrictions women were usually made to feel and observe. She was more in tune with another contemporary woman, MODERSOHN- BECKER: Her nude women are not seductive, nor are her pictures erotically charged. In fact, the woman seated on the edge of her bed in Nude with Striped Coverlet (1922) has her eyes cast down to read a book, and is self-contained and demure. In The Blue Room (1923), Valadon sabotages the nude ODALISQUE convention of INGRES and MANET-she places a buxom woman with a cigarette in her mouth on a bed, surrounded by patterned fabric, and dressed in what look like widestriped pajama bottoms and an undershirt. The historian Patricia Mathews thinks that Valadon was painting "the new intellectual woman of the ilk of Gertrude Stein." Valadon also painted many portraits; her models were often friends and family, including her son, UTRILLO. Painting people "to learn to known them," as in the quotation above, was a constant devotion of hers. Valadon's figures are heavily outlined, their faces generally unemotional. There is little directly communicated psychological intensity; complexity in Valadon's work depends on subtle references to scene setting, patterns, color, and circumstance.
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