Suzanne Valadon. Self-Portrait, detail. Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia 26 September — 9 January It depicts a woman reclining casually on a bed, her no-nonsense presence at odds with the floral-patterned comfort of the impressionistically painted alcove she occupies. There are multiple signs that this is not the conventional odalisque, seen through a patriarchal gaze.
For one, she is not nude, but dressed in decidedly unseductive striped pyjama bottoms, her pink camisole stretched tautly across a bosom that is more maternal than coquettish, her hair decorously rolled into a tight bun. Her capable, chunky hands and feet are working class, not those of a carefully groomed courtesan, and from her lips, which show no trace of a beguiling, enigmatic smile, a cigarette dangles. At her feet, of all unlikely objects, are two books. She reads, we might infer. Ignoring the viewer, her thoughts appear to be elsewhere.
The Blue Room, Valadon is yet another female artist with a strong body of work who has largely been sidelined by history. Valadon was not a suffragette or a feminist, but she was a resourceful, independent and adventurous woman, who, she claimed, ran off to join the circus as a teenager. Suffering a temporarily incapacitating accident, she turned to drawing during her convalescence, for which she had always shown a precocious talent.
She was self-taught and, unlike Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot who came from privileged backgrounds, she was dirt poor.
To earn money, she began to model by the time she was 15, but she also wanted to learn from the many master painters who inhabited Montmartre. Valadon was much sought after as a model, and the show begins with a handful of paintings in which she is the subject, including reproductions of some by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, for whom she frequently posed.
