An unconventional lifestyle, more or less fatal relationships, a profession that women of her time were reluctant to accept: Marie-Clémentine ("Suzanne") Valadon was not only a modernist painter. At the notorious Parisian Monmartre, she turned out to be a tough fighter who did not want to accept the existence of men as models and muse painters.
The illegitimate daughter of a washerwoman made her living as a modiste, circus artist and waitress before she became an artist and started to use a pencil and brush herself. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, one of the many men who crossed her path, not only gave her heartache, but also the stage name Suzanne. Pierre Auguste Renoir and especially Edgar Degas proved to be invaluable supporters of the talented self-taught artist. City views, self-portraits, flower pictures, and again and again (female) nudes: Suzanne Valadon realized her preferred motifs as freely as she lived.
For reasons of decency, she was not allowed to exhibit her 1909 oil painting "Adam and Eve" until she had painted a vine of fig leaves over Adam's loins. She had chosen herself as a model for Eve, Adam was modelled on her lover at the time and from 1914 on her second husband André Utter (1886 - 1948). Suzanne Valadon, mother of the painter Maurice Utrillo (1883 - 1955), had "demystified" nude painting, it was later said, and had brought the female nude in particular "rigorously realistic" to the canvas. Although she sold only a few paintings during her lifetime, she painted like a driven woman until the end. The woman with the moving biography died of a stroke she suffered while painting.
An unconventional lifestyle, more or less fatal relationships, a profession that women of her time were reluctant to accept: Marie-Clémentine ("Suzanne") Valadon was not only a modernist painter. At the notorious Parisian Monmartre, she turned out to be a tough fighter who did not want to accept the existence of men as models and muse painters.
The illegitimate daughter of a washerwoman made her living as a modiste, circus artist and waitress before she became an artist and started to use a pencil and brush herself. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, one of the many men who crossed her path, not only gave her heartache, but also the stage name Suzanne. Pierre Auguste Renoir and especially Edgar Degas proved to be invaluable supporters of the talented self-taught artist. City views, self-portraits, flower pictures, and again and again (female) nudes: Suzanne Valadon realized her preferred motifs as freely as she lived.
For reasons of decency, she was not allowed to exhibit her 1909 oil painting "Adam and Eve" until she had painted a vine of fig leaves over Adam's loins. She had chosen herself as a model for Eve, Adam was modelled on her lover at the time and from 1914 on her second husband André Utter (1886 - 1948). Suzanne Valadon, mother of the painter Maurice Utrillo (1883 - 1955), had "demystified" nude painting, it was later said, and had brought the female nude in particular "rigorously realistic" to the canvas. Although she sold only a few paintings during her lifetime, she painted like a driven woman until the end. The woman with the moving biography died of a stroke she suffered while painting.
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