Simply as one of Montmartre's favorite models of the 1880s and 1890s, the petite ex-trapeze artist named Marie-Clémentine Valadon would have remained a fascinating creature. Her striking features, intense blue eyes and mocking impudence attracted most of the painters of her youth, from Puvis de Chavannes to Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. But because Marie-Clémentine gave birth to Maurice Utrillo, one of the century's most successful, eccentric and curiously talented painters, her fame as model and mother has largely obscured another passion she fiercely nourished: to be an artist in her own right.
Last week Suzanne Valadon (as she signed her work) was gaining posthumous recognition with her first solo show in the U.S.A collection of 60 prints and drawings at Manhattan's Peter H. Deitsch Gallery left little doubt that, within the narrow limits she set herself, she had succeeded brilliantly in creating what she wished, not "beautiful drawings designed to be framed, but good drawings, which capture a moment of life in movement—all intensity."
Model's Secret. Born the illegitimate daughter of a hard-working peasant woman, Suzanne Valadon was raised in the Paris streets like countless gamins, working as a seamstress, waitress, vegetable seller, and drawing for pleasure on the sidewalks with pieces of coal. Tradition has it that she first caught the eye of Painter Puvis de Chavannes when she delivered his laundry. Struck by her slim figure and natural grace, he made her the model for all the figures (both male and female) in his most celebrated painting, The Sacred Wood. Other assignments soon followed. Auguste Renoir used her as the model for his contrasting pictures, Country Dance and City Dance. Toulouse-Lautrec's drawing of her, Gueule de Bois (The Hangover), so attracted Van Gogh that he wrote his brother, eagerly inquiring: "Has De Lautrec finished his picture of the woman leaning on her elbows on a little table in a café?"
Renoir was the first to discover his model's secret. When Suzanne failed to show up for a sitting one day, Renoir went to her room. Finding her drawing a self-portrait in pastels, Renoir exclaimed in astonishment: "You, too?" Lautrec also praised her work, saw to it that she met the great, testy French master, Edgar Degas, who had seen her as an acrobat at Place Pigalle's Molier Circus before a bad fall finished her brief career. Degas in turn was delighted. Said he: "You are one of us." Recalled Suzanne, years later: "That day I had wings."
"That She-Devil." Neither the birth of an illegitimate son, Maurice,* when Suzanne was 18, nor her subsequent turbulent love affairs checked her career. Under Degas' tutelage, Suzanne improved her drawing and learned the technique of drypoint etching. She did most of her drawing at home, finding her ideal subjects in the figures of maids, charwomen and women friends whom she sketched, usually bathing. Degas, astonished at her natural talent, hung her work in his dining room, once chided her: "That she-devil of a Maria, what talent she has . . . Why do you show me nothing more?"