Suzanne Valadon Quotes

Absinthe, or wormwood, the liquorice-flavoured, plant-based liqueur, had been popular in France throughout the 19th century. Though the drink was of Swiss origin, heavy tax on import had encouraged H.L. Pernod to start producing it commercially in France at the end of the 18th century.12 It was a tremendous success, and as the 19th century unfolded, its popularity soared. Exceedingly potent, it was closer to a soft drug than a drink. ‘The drunkenness it gives does not resemble any known drunkenness,’ bemoaned Alfred Delvau. ‘It makes you lose your footing right away […] You think you are headed towards infinity, like all great dreamers, and you are only headed towards incoherence.’13 In excess, absinthe could have a fatal effect on the nervous system, and by the time Maria started attending the bars and cafés where it was served, it had become a national curse. A favourite drink among the working classes precisely because of its relative cheapness for the effect produced, absinthe became the scapegoat for a host of social ills, not least the Commune. (...) Absinthe found a dedicated following among artists, writers and poets (including Charles Baudelaire), for whom the liquor became the entrancing ‘green fairy’. Its popularity in these circles was due primarily to its intoxicating effect, but also because its consumption was accompanied by a curious ritual which appealed to quirky individuals with a taste for the extraordinary. To counteract the drink’s inherent bitterness, a sugar lump was placed on a special spoon with a hole in it, which was held above the glass while water was poured over it, with the effect of sweetening the absinthe. Not surprisingly, absinthe flowed freely through the bars and cafés of Montmartre.

Maurice’s eccentric, antisocial behaviour became a feature of Pierrefitte. In town, residents whispered about the Mousis-Valadon family and their half-crazed son, while behind the closed doors of Villa Hochard, fiery scenes became a fixed part of the weekly ritual.

Suzanne’s life seemed to have taken an altogether different course. With matters at home so chaotic, she had all but stopped producing the bold figure studies with confident lines that Degas so admired.

The other piece she produced that year was just as atypical. Maternity (1900) was the first mother and child scene she had ever drawn. And yet it was a subject she knew. The composition was tender, gentle, balanced – quite unlike her studies of older children and nudes.

Her withdrawal from creative life did not go unnoticed. ‘Every year, Terrible Maria, I see arrive this firm, chiselled writing,’ Degas observed, ‘but I never see the author appear with a folder under her arm. And yet I am growing old. Happy New Year.’16

became clear that for the time being, it would be most practical for the family to make their base the apartment in the Rue Cortot.22

Meanwhile, the art scene in the capital was flourishing. While Suzanne’s career continued to stagnate, all around her, creativity was simmering

She had always painted people as a way of understanding them, using her figure studies as a form of dialogue. Now, she felt compelled to choose subjects that demanded nothing of her in return. The composition was simple, naive even, the forms crudely drawn, the palette limited.

passed.20 He was 37 years old.

From time to time, I look at your study in red chalk, which is still hanging in my dining room; and I always say to myself: ‘that she-devil Maria could draw like a little daemon’. Why don’t you show me your work anymore? I am nearing 67.17

Painting had finally brought Maurice what he had always craved: Suzanne’s attention and an intimate mother–son bond.

Maurice remembered the decision as one of the happiest ever made on his behalf.23 For Suzanne, it was as though she had been reborn.

Then followed a job in a factory, making lampshades; that lasted only a few weeks before Maurice got into a fight.26 And the more positions he was dismissed from, the more angry, self-critical and despondent he became. The fallout led to alcoholic binges of increasing severity and duration.

Suzanne could hardly believe it: Maurice’s pictures were actually good – very good. And they were nothing like hers. He had a style which was entirely his own. ‘You need to learn to draw,’ his mother told him firmly once she had assimilated what she was observing.

Once or twice, Suzanne happened to mention the work of the recently deceased Alfred Sisley, and henceforward, the painter became Maurice’s obsession and his idol.

With his negative self-image, Maurice resigned himself to the conclusion that his character was fundamentally flawed.

The young Pablo Picasso had come to see a painting he had had accepted to the Exposition Universelle, Last Moments (1899), fittingly, just as the Exposition was closing.

admitted to an institution to receive professional care. On 12 January 1904, he left his home with Suzanne, Madeleine and the man he still called ‘M. Paul’, and was escorted to Sainte-Anne’s psychiatric hospital in Paris.34

Soon, Suzanne was astonished and delighted to see that his work was developing. It was getting better. And his rate of production was staggering; in little more than a year, Maurice completed nearly 150 canvases.41 Fascinatingly, he was not attracted to the figures that caught his mother’s attention. Maurice shied away from human exchanges. Rather, he was drawn to buildings and walls, and he executed his studies with the exactness of an architect, using the same mathematical precision he had brought to his scrutiny of scientific manuals.

El Quat Gats

And it just so happened that one of the founders of the young Picasso’s favourite haunt was a man Suzanne knew well: Miguel Utrillo.

Suzanne was still striving to steer Maurice towards a more salubrious way of life in early September 1901, when a shattering piece of news reached her: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was dead.

All the while, Maurice continued to drink. Having invested in land on the Butte Pinson in the commune of Montmagny, Paul Mousis proposed that he build the family a new house. They could have a high fenced garden and no immediate neighbours; it would be far less awkward whenever Maurice had one of his ‘turns’.

Suzanne disliked using tubes of paint. She preferred the control of pigments that hand mixing allowed, and scoffed at the disdain in which certain painters held the business of mixing paints themselves (on the basis that it turned them into artisans rather than artists).

Sainte-Anne had restored Maurice’s body and Suzanne’s peace of mind. But it had kept a part of his soul.

Suzanne began to work prolifically. She took familiar subjects: nudes, her maid Catherine, her dogs, and flowers – the beauty of which she had now come to appreciate. She also began work on a large canvas, The Moon and the Sun and the Brunette and the Blonde (1903).24 Her painting reflected her altered state of mind.

Returning to Montmartre, Suzanne was like a wilted plant revived. People knew her, too, even if only by sight. Among young art students and amateur painters, her glittering backlist of employers like Puvis, Renoir and Lautrec had turned her into a minor celebrity. Renoir’s interest in a woman immediately recommended her in the eyes of budding male artists.

Their family friend Dr Ettlinger, who had stood as witness at the couple’s wedding, had urged Suzanne to teach Maurice to paint. Doing something creative with his hands would at the very least distract him and channel that unspent energy, Dr Ettlinger had reasoned. It might even prove the miracle cure to his malady. Suzanne was ready to pounce on any new idea which offered a potential remedy, however speculative the results. And painting was what she knew. She agreed: the countryside often proved a source of inspiration to new painters. It seemed worth a try.27

Suzanne always mixed her own colours

quirky new café-cum-cabaret, El Quat Gats,

Increasingly, a new generation of artists were finding the creative projects which so excited them systematically rebuffed by the official art bodies. It was exasperating. Did the jury of the Salon, that ‘great event’ of the artistic world, never tire of the tedious repertoire of historical events and myths that had formed the mainstay of Salon paintings for so long? Did they not feel ridiculed being sold the blatant lie of highly finished paint surfaces, of bodies without a blemish, of landscapes stripped of all signs of modernity? Was contemporary life, the sweat and odour of real men and women, not deserving of a place on the Salon walls? Young artists huddled around tables in Montmartre’s cafés, sharing their deepest frustrations, breathing life into their most keenly held ideas. Just a few streets away from the Cimetière de Montmartre, Édouard Manet, the enfant terrible of the contemporary art world, could be found at his regular table in the Café Guerbois surrounded by reverent confrères, who would in time become famous in their own right. When Manet spoke, his blue eyes sparkled, his body leant forwards persuasively, and an artistic revolution felt achievable. The atmosphere was electric, the conversation passionate – often heated, but always exciting. The discussions ‘kept our wits sharpened,’ Claude Monet later recalled, ‘they encouraged us with stores of enthusiasm that for weeks and weeks kept us up.’ And though the war caused many of the artists to leave the capital, it proved merely a temporary migration. At the time Madeleine and her daughters arrived in Montmartre, the artists had firmly marked their patch.

Like alcohol and coffee, song had been cast as the faithful servant of political opposition when Louis-Napoleon came to power. Singing in cafés was consequently one of the first forms of expression outlawed under his regime. However, when a series of decrees in the 1860s had lifted many of the restrictions imposed on entertainment venues (notably by permitting the use of props, costumes and music), café-concerts had begun to flourish. By the 1880s, there were over 200 such venues belting out hearty songs about working-class life across Paris. Along with the usual facilities of a café, café-concerts also offered a small indoor stage or a covered pavilion outside where singers, and sometimes acrobats and comedians, performed for an often raucous audience. Patrons paid more than they would in a standard café, either in the form of an entrance fee or through elevated drinks prices. But many judged the supplement worthwhile; the atmosphere was relaxed, the singers, though not first rate, were undeniably ‘of the people’, and unlike theatre-goers, audience members could also smoke. And as one guidebook writer exclaimed with surprise, ‘sometimes, one can actually hear quite good music.

Rodolphe Salis was a tall, red-headed bohemian with a coppery beard and boundless charisma. He had tried and failed to make a success of several different careers, including painting decorations for a building in Calcutta. But by 1881 he was listless and creatively frustrated, uncertain where his niche might lie. More pressingly, he was desperate to secure a steady income. But then he had the ingenious idea to turn the studio which he rented, a disused post office on the resolutely working-class Boulevard de Rochechouart, into a cabaret with a quirky, artistic bent. He was not the first to attempt such a venture: La Grande Pinte on the Avenue Trudaine had been uniting artists and writers to discuss and give spontaneous performances for several years. But Salis was determined that his initiative would be different – and better. A fortuitous meeting ensured that it was. Poet Émile Goudeau was the founder of the alternative literary group the Hydropathes (‘water-haters’ – meaning that they preferred wine or beer). After meeting Goudeau in the Latin Quarter and attending a few of the group’s gatherings, Salis became convinced that a more deliberate form of entertainment than had been offered at La Grande Pinte would create a venue that was truly innovative – and profitable. The Hydropathe members needed a new meeting place, and so Salis persuaded Goudeau to rally his comrades and convince them to relocate from the Latin Quarter to his new cabaret artistique. They would be able to drink, smoke, talk and showcase their talents and their wit. Targeting an established group like the Hydropathes was a stroke of genius on Salis’s part. Baptising his cabaret Le Chat Noir after the eponymous feline of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, he made certain that his ready-made clientele were not disappointed. Everything about the ambience and the decor reflected Salis’s unconventional, anti-establishment approach, an ethos which the Hydropathes shared. A seemingly elongated room with low ceilings was divided in two by a curtain. The front section was larger and housed a bar for standard customers. But the back part of the room (referred to as ‘L’Institut’) was reserved exclusively for artists. Fiercely proud of his locality, Salis was adamant that he could make Montmartre glorious. ‘What is Montmartre?’ Salis famously asked. ‘Nothing. What should it be? Everything!’ Accordingly, Salis invited artists from the area to decorate the venue. Adolphe Léon Willette painted stained-glass panels for the windows, while Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen created posters. And all around, a disorientating mishmash of antiques and bric-a-brac gave the place a higgledy-piggledy feel. There was Louis XIII furniture, tapestries and armour alongside rusty swords; there were stags’ heads and wooden statues nestled beside coats of arms. It was weird, it was wonderful and it was utterly bizarre – the customers loved it.

It was an exhilarating time to be involved in the art world, in any capacity. At last, individualism was encouraged, not condemned. By the 1880s, Impressionism was yesterday’s news. Artists had already gone beyond it, and were experimenting with new forms, content and techniques. Diversity was the modus vivendi. Accordingly, 1880s Paris became the birthplace of some radically different movements, including Divisionism, Symbolism, Synthesism and Nabis. Furthermore, the proliferation of alternative exhibiting bodies offered real grounds for hope for avant-garde painters and those hailing from the fringes of society. The Salon was no longer the sole and hazardous rite of passage lying between a painter and success. There were now other organisations where reputations could be forged, such as the Société des Aquarellistes Français. But by far the most notable and innovative artistic venture in 1884 was the Salon des Artistes Indépendants. When his technically daring composition Bathers at Asnières (1884) was rejected by the jury of the 1884 Salon, former pupil of the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts Georges Seurat was spurred to retaliate. Joining forces with a number of other disgruntled painters, among them Symbolist Odilon Redon and self-taught artist Albert Dubois-Pillet, Seurat helped found the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants. With Redon acting as chairman, the group proposed to do something unprecedented: they would mount a show whose organisers were not answerable to any official institution, and where there would be no prizes and, significantly, no jury. The venture introduced a radically new concept onto the Parisian art scene: freedom. The first exhibition, the Salon des Artistes Indépendants, was held from May to July in a temporary building in the Jardin des Tuileries near the Louvre.

For many country folk, the railway was Paris. Its gleaming tracks brought tales of success, prosperity and realised dreams to the provinces, qualities with which the capital was increasingly seen as synonymous. For a countrywoman like Madeleine, short on money and luck, overworked, and whose future appeared only to offer more of the same, those dazzling steel tracks represented a chance. All at once, resignation turned to hope. Suddenly, Madeleine could see clearly. If she stayed in Bessines, her future was mapped out – and it was bleak. But if she boarded the train to Paris, anything was possible – perhaps even happiness. Jeanne and Widow Guimbaud were horrified when, not five years after Marie-Clémentine’s birth, Madeleine announced that her mind was made up: she was going to start a new life in Paris.

Then, at last, Madeleine’s luck turned. She came across Montmartre. With its windmills, its clear air and the old-fashioned, village feel of its higgledy-piggledy houses perched on a slope, few places recalled the Limousin countryside so vividly as Montmartre. It was up to 129 metres above sea level at the highest point. Why, with its narrow, winding streets and alleys, and its cottages clinging to the hillside, a person could have believed themselves in Le Mas Barbu. The bustling Rue Lepic and the Place des Abbesses readily called to mind Bessines’ town square on a busy market day. And all around, steep, grassy banks rose up protectively, hillside homes bloomed with flowers, old men installed in wrought iron chairs sat outside doorways and set the world to rights, children played in the street and women chatted and gossiped as they made their way to fill baskets with provisions. At last, Madeleine had found somewhere familiar, reassuring, comforting. Montmartre felt like home.

Meanwhile, Renoir was hard at work on his vast painting, The Large Bathers (1884–1887), painstakingly sketching, reworking and perfecting a voluptuous Maria as she reclined naked to treat viewers to the sight of her radiant skin, firm breasts and sun-kissed hair. But of all Maria’s dramatic incarnations, one of the most talked about at that year’s Salon was undoubtedly Puvis de Chavannes’s The Sacred Grove of the Arts and Muses (1884).

Models posed either for parts (the head, a clothed torso, for example), or, more controversially, for l’ensemble – the full (often nude) figure.

But in the middle of 1882, when Maria was sixteen, she was offered a modelling assignment with an artist who far overshadowed Zandomeneghi. It was then that Maria was recommended to Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Marie-Clémentine’s brushstrokes and charcoal lines were already bolder, more defiant – far less feminine.

If a girl from a poor family like Marie-Clémentine truly wanted to make a living in the art world, there was only one way she could be sure of doing so. She needed to approach the business from the other side of the canvas: she would have to become a model.

So ingrained in the Parisian psyche was the connection between posing and prostitution that artist’s models were frequently referred to as grisettes, the name also used to designate working-class girls who supplemented their income through prostitution

In Paris, a female model could make ten and sometimes up to twenty francs per day, more than a peasant – or a charwoman like Madeleine – could ever dream of earning.

when Marie-Clémentine was spotted, she landed one of the most enviable commissions imaginable. For the artist who first noticed her was none other than the eminent Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Modelling thereby handed her the key to unlock a door which remained firmly bolted to the likes of Morisot, Cassatt and even many lower-class women.

she could take a seat for the evening in the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes. Conveniently located on the Place Pigalle, it was to this café that Édouard Manet and his Impressionist companions had switched allegiance from the Café Guerbois in the 1870s.16 It was also the café whose unremarkable interior Edgar Degas used as the setting for his In the Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (1875–1876).

That year, she produced her first female nude. She also faced her trepidation about painting in oils, producing Young Girl Crocheting and Portrait of a Young Girl.

was difficult to ignore the resemblance between Maria and many of the major figure subjects Renoir tackled between 1884 and 1887. There was The Large Bathers (1884–1887), but also Woman with a Fan (1886) and Young Woman with a Swan (1886).23 And then in 1887, Renoir painted Maria in one of his most suggestive interpretations yet: The Plait.

Degas was astounded by the pieces Suzanne brought to show him. How a linen maid’s daughter with not a day’s training could take a pencil and handle it with such assurance, maintain such confident control of a line as to bring a form to life on a flat page, left him speechless.

American painter Elizabeth Nourse had actually been invited to join the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and by the mid-1890s had become a regular participant at the group’s annual salons, where she had earned herself a prodigious reputation.6 But Nourse had been born into a highly respectable Catholic family from Cincinnati.

Suzanne was resolutely working-class and had never set foot in an art school or atelier in any other capacity than as a model. Degas and Bartholomé could feel rightly proud.

Suzanne had perfected drawings which were characterised by sharp, almost crude contours. Her profiles were executed with a pure, single line. To achieve such a crisp silhouette in what appeared to be a single stroke demanded confidence, courage and hours of practice.

Suzanne’s children looked introspective, isolated – and lonely, so incredibly lonely. The only carer to be found was the grandmother. The mother was nowhere to be seen.11

Other artists showed what viewers wanted to see. Suzanne showed them what was true.

Paul Mousis had rented his lover a studio, next door to Erik Satie’s apartment. One such

With Suzanne’s command of line, soft ground etching was a fitting progression. It was the first formal art teaching she had ever received. Suzanne produced a series of nudes on Degas’s press, several of her maid, Catherine, drying herself by the side

Starting at the end of the 18th century, the family began to be characterised – or idealised – by more intimate relationships, while the child was increasingly treated not dispassionately as simply a means of securing property and continuing the family name (as in the past) but as an individual worthy of affection. Now, children should be cosseted, nurtured and adored by their parents, who were encouraged to take a more hands-on role in their care. In short, paternity and maternity had become deeply fashionable among the bourgeoisie, that same class who were, coincidentally, the main consumers of art.9 The Salon walls were obligingly filled with genre paintings in which, in a convenient recasting of the traditional Madonna and child theme, happy mothers cuddled contented, rosy-cheeked infants.

Suzanne’s pictures of children flew in the face of those idealised images of social harmony. Her youngsters were not nude, but unashamedly naked. They were not posed, but awkward, their scrawny limbs contracted into clumsy postures, ungainly, unaesthetic, but utterly natural. Self-aware but not self-conscious, Suzanne Valadon, Nude Girl Sitting, 1894, black

in the catalogue to the exhibition, she was listed not as ‘Mme’ or ‘Mlle’ like other women exhibitors, but simply: ‘Valadon, S.’. When viewers looked from the catalogue in their hands to the drawings in front of them, they had no way of knowing that the artist they were contemplating was a woman.

Mousis did not boast the sparkling good humour of Lautrec, the multitalented, Mediterranean charm of Miguel, nor the thrilling eccentricity of Satie. But he was undeniably good-looking, manly – and secure.