Suzanne Valadon

Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) left a fascinating, transgressive and radical body of work to art history. Her rebellious character, her exceptional destiny, her life and her art, shared with her son Maurice Utrillo and her husband André Utter, have never ceased to inspire interpretation of her work. Every aspect of the romantic life of an artist in contact with a range of different universes gives us a vital portrait of emerging modernity, throwing light on an era on the cusp of two worlds and taking the spectator from the 19^th to the 20^th century.

More than sixty years after the last Suzanne Valadon retrospective in France, which the Musée National d’Art Moderne hosted in 1967, the exhibition ‘Suzanne Valadon: A World of Her Own’ sheds light on this exceptional model turned artist. The third retrospective curated by Chiara Parisi, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the exhibition sets out to highlight the expressive and resolutely contemporary character of her work and to reassess Suzanne Valadon’s position in the history of art, which has attached little importance to this bold artist, whose output was for a long time considered peripheral to the dominant currents of her time – Cubism and abstract art were blossoming at a time when she was passionately advocating the need to paint reality.