This is the first major exhibition in France dedicated to the œuvre of Suzanne Valadon since 1967. Beginning her artistic career as one of the key models of the Impressionist artists, Renoir, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, Valadon was advised by Degas to pursue drawing and painting. By the early 1900s she had become an accomplished painter of nudes and still lifes and one of the first women artists to take on the male nude as her subject.

Our lecture will focus on Valadon’s life in the Bohemian circles of Montmartre where she lived and worked all her life, her relationship with the many men and artists in her life, her turbulent relations with her equally famous painter son, Maurice Utrillo, and also many of the lesser-known contemporary women painters in Paris chosen to complement her work in the exhibition : Juliette Roche, Georgette Agutte, Jacqueline Marval, Émilie Charmy and Hélène Delasalle.