The woman christened Marie-Clémentine Valadon (1865–1938) earned a number of monikers, both during her lifetime and subsequent to it. History remembers her as Suzanne—a reference to the biblical story of Susannah and the Elders made by her sometimes lover Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Valadon, you see, began her career modeling for old men like Auguste Renoir and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Edgar Degas, a lifelong friend of Valadon and collector of her art, gave her the nickname “terrible Maria.” The historian Catherine Hewitt titled her 2017 biography of Valadon Renoir’s Dancer, based on Valadon’s having posed for Renoir’s signature canvas, Dance at Bougival (1883). The journalist June Rose referred to the artist as “The Mistress of Montmartre” in recognition of Valadon’s freewheeling lifestyle. The Barnes Foundation, which has mounted the first U.S. retrospective devoted to Valadon, is heralding her as a model and painter, but also as a rebel.
Degas touted the self-taught painter as “one of us.”
“Model, Painter, Rebel” includes close to sixty works, the majority of them oil on canvas, along with a handful of drawings and prints. The pieces we encounter upon entering the exhibition aren’t by Valadon, but, rather, feature her as subject. Paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec, Santiago Rusiñol, Jean Eugène Clary, and Gustav Wertheimer—whose Kiss of the Siren (1882) starts things offwith impressive bluster—do much to establish Valadon as an integral presence in the Parisian art scene. Her biographical details are rich and varied and, given Valadon’s tendency for the