Suzanne Valadon: the model-turned-artist who painted for the female gaze

Suzanne Valadon’s story has all the hallmarks of a Hollywood movie: the starry-eyed trapeze artist who came from poverty to be painted by the great men of the 19th century, becoming the face of fin-de-siècle Paris, the centre of all that was new and exciting, before revealing a singular artistic talent of her own. Like the city she lived in, she had a knack for seizing the moment, taking every chance that came her way.

Born Marie-Clémentine Valadon in 1865, the illegitimate daughter of a domestic servant, she grew up in the working-class neighbourhood of Montmartre in Paris. A wild little thing, five feet tall with reddish-brown hair, by 15 she was performing at the Cirque Fernando on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. There is a sketch of Valadon by Berthe Morisot — arms raised, her slender legs effortlessly balancing on a tightrope — that reveals what an enchanting picture she must have made. Six months later, she fell from a trapeze, sustaining an injury that ended her career.

Modelling was her plan B, and she soon caught the attention of the respected Symbolist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who became something of a father figure. He was her entry into the avant-garde, and over the next decade she worked as a model, posing for some of the finest painters of the time, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir (who depicted her in the famous Dance at Bougival and The Umbrellas) and her great friend Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

When Valadon was 18, she met Edgar Degas and persuaded him to be her mentor. The Impressionist painter admired her talent and courage, recognising in her exacting portraits (‘harsh and supple’, he said) the work of a fellow traveller. ‘You’re one of us,’ he declared. It was not a description he might have given to the other female painters in his orbit, such as Morisot and Mary Cassatt; but Valadon was a child of la vie bohème. She had grown up among working women, drank and smoked in cafés and nightclubs, and understood street life better than her bourgeois contemporaries.

It was around this time that Valadon began dating a piano player at the nightclub Le Chat Noir — the brilliant composer and proto-Surrealist Erik Satie — and their brief affair gave rise to his wonderfully titled composition Vexations. Consisting of a haunting motif that was to be repeated 840 times (thought to represent the number of occasions on which Valadon had provoked him during their relationship), it was not performed in full until 1963, when John Cage and a team of pianists took more than 18 hours to complete it.

Satie was, unsurprisingly, just one of Valadon’s many admirers. Having given birth to a child out of wedlock when she was 18 (the father remained a mystery, although the Spanish painter Miquel Utrillo signed the legal document of paternity), Valadon eventually married a banker who gave her enough financial security to paint full-time. However, in 1909, Valadon’s son, the painter Maurice Utrillo, introduced her to a young artist called André Utter. It was the start of a volatile relationship between Valadon, her alcoholic son and Utter that lasted until her death in 1938. Locals nicknamed them ‘the unholy trinity’. Canvases were regularly destroyed.

Earlier this year, Valadon was the subject of a large-scale retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The first at the museum since 1967, it featured work spanning the five decades of the artist’s career.

Over the years, historians have struggled to categorise Valadon. She has been described as a Symbolist and a Post-Impressionist, but a better description might be ‘Cezanne as a feminist’. Her women radiate an unconscious sexual energy; they are earthy and relaxed, outlined in dense black lines. It is easy to see where Alice Neel or Paula Rego might have got their inspiration.

More than most, Valadon recognised the vulnerability of being a woman in front of the easel. A model since her mid-teens, she knew from experience that it was a one-way transaction, in which the muse gave a part of herself but received very little in return. She understood the strain of holding a difficult pose, the aching muscles, the stiffening, the boredom.

The women in her pictures are not idealised or titillating, but real working women with bodies to match, and she expresses so much of their inner being through their forms. Her masterpiece is unquestionably The Blue Room (1923). It depicts a reclining model in her pyjamas, smoking a cigarette. There is a laid-back insouciance in her pose: the sunburnt décolleté, the clothes worn for comfort rather than flattery, and the books lying by her feet. It has been described as a riposte to Edouard Manet’s Olympia and an ‘anti-odalisque’ in response to Henri Matisse’s alluring harem girls; but ultimately, it is a symbol of female emancipation.

Offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 15 October 2025 at Christie’s in London is Deux nus ou Le Bain (Two Nudes or The Bath), a formidable work painted in 1923, the same year as The Blue Room. Depicting two working women drying off after a bath, it continues Valadon’s radical manifesto of painting for the female gaze, rather than the male.

The women are strong, unselfconscious and at ease. The flesh is densely sculpted, the skin mottled with colour turning to red where it has been vigorously dried. Valadon has broken with convention to include pubic hair, something that was considered subversive in 1923. There is a casual, easy grace to the women: they are ‘anti-models’, unconcerned with the way they are being presented.

The artist’s transition from muse to painter had not been an easy one, and was riven with small humiliations. Critics described her work as having a ‘commoner’s sensibility’ and a ‘woman’s meanness’, suggesting that her class and her gender somehow marred her work. Thanks to her champions Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, she was admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1894 — the first woman to be granted the honour. But it would be another 17 years before she had her first solo exhibition, at Galerie Clovis Sagot.

By the 1920s, however, she was prosperous enough to be able to buy a large chateau near Villefranche-sur-Saône, just north of Lyon. Her studio in Paris is now part of the Musée de Montmartre, where the life of this groundbreaking artist is being rediscovered. Just before she died, in 1938, she told a critic, ‘My work is done. The only satisfaction it gives me is never to have betrayed or surrendered anything which I believed.’

Led by the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 15 October 2025, Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online, 8-21 October. Find out more about the preview exhibition and sales

Related artists: Suzanne Valadon