On the painter Suzanne Valadon...

First, some recommended listening: One Day International's "Sleeping on Trains" and "Miss Your Mouth". Listen, listen, listen here.

And now, in the spirit of celebrating under-recognized female painters,  immortalized in oil by the artists for whom they modeled, let's talk about the lovely Suzanne Valadon. She, like Victorine Meurent (whom we talked about last week), modeled for Renoir, Degas, pretty Berthe Morisot, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

The child of a laundress, Valadon began working as a circus acrobat at the age of 15. But when a fall from a trapeze ended her career two years later, she was forced to turn to modeling for money. Of course, modeling for artists usually led to more intimate relationships, and apparently, it was not long before she was pregnant. According to a bawdy joke later told by Diego Rivera, she first went to Renoir, but he disavowed paternity, indicating the color was all wrong. Next, she went to Degas, who indicated the form was all wrong for the baby to be his. Finally, after she belched her tale of woe to a Spanish painter named Miguel Utrillo y Molins, he declared, "I would be glad to put my name to the work of either Renoir or Degas!" And so, Maurice Valadon (the baby in question) was officially (if not accurately) legitimized and became Maurice Utrillo. Thanks to Valadon's training and encouragement, Utrillo, who long suffered from emotional difficulties and alcoholism, became a successful artist in his own right. But that's another story for another time.


Suzanne Valadon. Reclining Nude, 1928.
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Valadon, unlike Victorine Meurent, enjoyed professional esteem in her lifetime.  Her earlier work, in collections as prestitgious as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, seems influenced by Pierre Bonnard, while her later creations...say, from the mid- to late 1920s, seem flavored by the robust line and geometric contours of Cezanne. Dig Reclining Nude, 1928 (at right) for example. I see Cezanne's fruit there, don't you? Well...come on now. I didn't mean it that way. Seriously, there's Post-Impressionism all over the place in this painting, no?



Suzanne Valadon,
Portrait of Erik Satie.

 Apparently, Suzanne Valadon also completely bewitched the composer Erik Satie, whom she met while he played piano in a raucous bar with the refined name, Auberge du Clou. An eccentric bohemian, the penniless composer (who had a strong affinity for medieval plainsong and was soon to be associated with Rosicrucianism) carried on a six-month affair with Valadon, while they lived in adjacent rooms at 6 Rue Cortot. Satie, whose room held two pianos (one atop the other, with connected foot pedals) and a rather strange collection of 100 umbrellas, proposed to Valadon after their first night together. He soon nicknamed her "Biqui", and wrote her voluminous love letters. The couple even made portraits of one another, and while she gave her portrait to Satie, he kept the portrait he made of her. These were found together in his room, after his death.

But this is Suzanne's story, not Satie's, so back to it: Valadon was a perfectionist, reportedly working for well over a decade on her paintings before ever showing them. And it was not until 1909, when Valadon was 44, that she began painting full-time. By 1911, she had her first solo show, where she earned significant critical acclaim and garnered the patronage that allowed her to sustain herself for her remaining years. She reached the apex of her fame in the 1920s and enjoyed four retrospective exhibitions in her lifetime. She was held in such high esteem within the art world that Picasso and Braque even attended her funeral.

So what separates her fate from Victorine's? How is it that she has left her mark on art history (although, of course, it is a significantly more shallow a mark than that made by any of her male contemporaries thanks to traditional art historical narratives)? Persistance, I suppose. Where Victorine destroyed some of her paintings and fell into alcoholic obscurity, choosing instead to tell stories about her time with Manet for the price of a drink, Suzanne Valadon was creating, quietly, in relative sobriety, all along. She may have been no less promiscuous than Victorine, but she was productive and persistent, applying the kind of sustained concentration that earned her respect.

Interesting is that one of Valadon's most famous works, The Blue Room, seems to reference Victorine, since it bears a strong resemblance to Manet's Olympia. 

Suzanne Valadon, The Blue Room

Just as with Manet's work, Valadon's woman remains solid, significant, a different kind of female figure. She is not merely on display, but herself holding court to an unseen audience and completely at home with herself. Moreoever, she is wearing pants...presumably pajama pants, but pants nonetheless. Perhaps this is a reference to the Orientalism of the harem, but a pants-wearing female from the time of George Sand onward indicated the wearer's economic and emotional independence. This notion seems underscored by the books on the bed and the cigarette in her mouth, symbolic of independent thought and action during a period when  intellectual pursuits and public smoking were still considered inappropriate activities for women.



Perhaps then, this is a perfect portrait of Valadon herself, who achieved what Victorine did not: fame that extended beyond her physical attributes and into a fourth dimension, a kind of creative immortality.





Whatever Happened to Victorine Meurent?

A page from the amazing
"Whatever Happened to Victorine Meurent?"
Read about the comic's artist, Victoria Morris,
at her blog here.

So, I am more or less fully recovered from my bout with the flu, and apart from a terrible coughing fit I experienced while teaching last night, I am again a fully functioning human being. And I have to say: what a delightful thing that is.

Until you're sick, you forget how fantastic it is to breathe through your nose. No, don't laugh. I'm very serious about that. I really dislike being a mouth-breather. It's behavior *affecting a British accent* unbecoming a lady. Ha!

What's this on the left, you ask? Only something totally awesome I found here: Whatever Happened to Victorine Meurent? It's a comic (this is page three, on the left, which details Victorine's early life).

Who is Victorine Meurent, you ask? Only Manet's most enchanting model. And I say enchanting because the girl had some incredible self-possession.

Whether art history likes it or not, Victorine Meurent has become one of Western art's most iconic female figures, despite the fact that this same figure was ridiculed by critics in the worst possible terms when it went on display (in painted form) in the 1870s. But who hasn't somewhere seen Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, where Victorine levels her gaze at the viewer in a way that indicates--even if she were there in person--she would neither blink nor avert her eyes. And surely you've seen Olympia, where she poses as a naked courtesan presented with a gift of flowers from a customer by her maid. These are essential works in any survey of Western art, and sadly, Victorine has likely never gotten to appreciate one iota of her fame.

In fact, Victorine was a painter herself, one who was extremely talented. She exhibited repeatedly in the Paris Salon before even Manet enjoyed acceptance there. But her work was marginalized, perhaps because she was a woman or perhaps because recognition of her face and figure in Manet's paintings created a stir that eclipsed her own professional efforts. By 1879, she had been shut out of Manet's circle because her tendency towards free love incited violent jealousies among the men (I'm sure retrospective telling has toned down the scandal, and at the time, the gossip and examples of wounded pride were much more dramatic).

The comic (again, whose page three is visible above) gives a visual history of Victorine's life, and the author (whose name I haven't been able to find...Who are you? I'd love to give you credit because what you've done is totally wonderful!) has done some amazing excavations to fill in the long informational gaps that exist in Victorine's biography.

Victorine's GLBTQ encyclopedia entry, which I also gleaned from the comic's bibliographic page, indicates that in the early 1890s, she was the "intimate friend" of a courtesan named Marie Pellegrin, but had also turned to alcoholism. Yet, she continued to paint into the early 1900s and was still listed among professional artists. Then, she lived in the suburbs of Paris with a woman named Marie Dufour, a secretary and piano teacher.

Really, period critics, even many art historians have consistently given Victorine a raw deal. I am glad to see that she is not forgotten. She is a kind of hero to me, in the same way that my favorite chain-smoking, baggy-eyed male intellectuals are. She simply was, and although I'm absolutely certain I don't know the whole story behind Victorine's emotional life, she never apologized for being Victorine that I know of. And this is something to celebrate. It really is, since pretty often, life can be tough.

When I was in graduate school, I focused on the German Modernists and my boy George Grosz (whom I realized, sort of looks like Michael...hmmm...coincidence? I don't know.), but I was also lured by the Impressionists....not so much by their painting, but by their milieu: the theater crowds; the demimonde; the horse races, the absinthe, the flamboyant and disgusting beauty of the prostitutes. All of this fascinated me. Still, the frothy atmosphere Monet offered and the ballerina tulle Degas often choked me with made Impressionism somehow less potent than the angry absurdism of the Dadaists or the outright emotionalism of the Expressionists (okay and I dug the Post-Impressionists, too, but I won't get all the swank terms out of my tackle box right now *closing the lid*).

Anyway, anyway, this, this is a really good book. I read it in graduate school: Alias Olympia: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious Model & Her Own Desire. Eunice Lipton goes over to Europe and finds primary source documents in her atttempt to trace the path of Victorine. There's some self-revelation there and some "navel-gazing", but most importantly, Victorine begins to come to life again. 

It is sad that so little information still exists on Victorine. Even her paintings are largely lost, with the exception of one that sold for around $5,000 in the 1930s. Not a bad price, given that it was the beginning of the Depression. Still, no one can account for her work now, at least to my knowledge. I hope very much that a few of these paintings still exist and are just quietly waiting to re-emerge somewhere on one side of the big pond or the other.