The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.
biography
Important Art by Suzanne Valadon
Maurice Utrillo Playing With a Slingshot (1895)
As in all of her early drawings, Valadon develops a signature dark outline to her subjects. Unlike other women artists at the time Valadon rejected examples of a light and feathered “feminine” brushstroke, and instead experimented with bold and definitive lines, more typically considered to be “masculine”. Indeed, the style and energy of Valadon’s mark making is most comparable at this point with the work of Egon Schiele. Like Schiele, Valadon was driven by passions from within - an energy and life force. Her initial works are observational, drawings of the scenes that were around her at the time, and in this case the subject is her son.
Depicting one’s children is an interesting way for a woman to combine two roles that are often considered incompatible, that of being a mother and an artist. Kathe Kollwitz did a similar thing and since Valadon, more and more women have drawn, painted, and photographed their children as a way to be artists and at the same time care for their children and maintain domestic balance. Alice Neel painted both her children and grandchildren as available models and thus as a practice born of necessity. What is revealed is very interesting because the genre of portraiture is generally transformed, no longer a vehicle to communicate status and wealth, but rather an opportunity to reflect on identity and the workings of human psychology.
Adam and Eve (1909)
This painting was made during a highly productive period for Valadon when she had just met the young André Utter. She had fallen in love again and as such felt a surge in creativity and began to paint rather than draw much more. The nearly life-sized painting depicts Valadon as Eve and Utter as Adam, the original lovers in the paradise of the Garden of Eden. The painting was originally completed without the leaves covering Utter’s genitals, but they were added later in order to avoid scandal and to enable exhibition of the work in the Salon of 1920.
This was the first painting in which Valadon placed her subjects in an outdoor rather than interior setting. It was also the first painting exhibited by a female artist to show a nude man and woman together, and not merely any man or woman, but the artist and her lover (albeit in the guise of religious art). As Hewitt writes, “For a woman to paint a nude heterosexual couple showed extraordinary daring; it was simply not done.” The piece was audacious on a personal level too. The figures poised on the precipice of sin, with Eve/Valadon reaching for the apple, their naked bodies already entwined. Valadon may be referencing her own relationship here - that of an older woman and much younger man - he as the forbidden fruit, and she, with the confidence to take him. Overall, the painting makes the fact that people fall in love and have sex a much more public and real idea than convention at the time. This is not an ideal fantasy, even though presented in a biblical guise; the painting speaks of the meeting of fleshy bodies in a way that prior to this was unheard of.
With the classical pose and luminous sky set against the dark trees, the painting echoes paintings of the same theme done in the early 1500s of Lucas Cranach the Elder, copies of which were readily available to Valadon. There is no serpent in Valadon’s painting, though, and the figures seem weightless, appearing to be floating together. According to Hewitt, “The couple, Suzanne confessed, were caught in a timeless paradise and they were both responsible for their sin." This began a prolific period for Valadon, in which she started to paint more than draw, and to produce more paintings of nudes.
Joy of Life (1911)
This is an interesting painting in that it recalls similar scenes by the likes of Cezanne and Matisse. Indeed, bathers in nature or nudes in a landscape has been a time-honored theme for artists, from ancient Greece to 20th-century Paris and beyond. Titian, Renoir, and Paul Gauguin have also painted such a scene and Valadon was familiar with all of these precedents. The main difference in Valadon’s picture stems from her inclusion of the male figure to the side, for which her lover, Andre Utter, was the model. There is a sense once again that this painting seeks to demystify sex and attraction. Previously women in such scenes were portrayed languidly displaying themselves without the pointer as to where and to what the sexy poses would lead. Here there is no mistaking that what we are dealing with - desire, libido, and sex. This is not a painting about fantasy or flirtation, but about the physical yearning for sexual connectivity, importantly experienced by both men and women.
Professor and art historian Gill Perry writes in The Concise Dictionary of Women Artists, “These female figures seem strangely separate from each other, from the male viewer and from the nature that surrounds them. Far from evoking a utopian harmony of woman and nature suggested by, for example, Matisse or Gauguin, Valadon’s robust and sharply outlined women suggest a more ambiguous, dislocated relationship with both nature and the male spectator.”
More Important Art
Influences and Connections
Influences on Artist
Influenced by Artist
Artists
Friends & Personal Connections
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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec -
Edgar Degas 
Miguel Utrillo- André Utter
Movements & Ideas
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