cover image Suzanne Valadon: The Mistress of Montmartre

Suzanne Valadon: The Mistress of Montmartre

June Rose. St. Martin's Press, $27.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-312-19921-0

Montmartre was only a Parisian village when Marie-Clementine Valadon, the illegitimate daughter of a laundress, moved there with her mother in 1870 at the age of five. By her mid-teens, Valadon was drawing ""with instinctive and growing confidence,"" had performed in a local circus and was modeling for artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and lesser-known bohemians. At 18, now calling herself Suzanne, she gave birth to Maurice Utrillo, whose father she did not identify but whose name was derived from a Catalonian lover. Valadon's work as a model, Rose shows, culminated three years later when she served as a subject for Renoir's The Bathers. Shrewd and self-taught, Valadon moved from subject to sketcher and painter, producing portraits, still lifes, landscapes and earthy nudes that earned praise from Degas, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec and put her at the center of the area's artistic ferment and scandals. Married twice--the second time to a painter more than 20 years her junior--Valadon aged well and stayed at her easel and in public life even when her pictures had lost their clientele. Given a paucity of documentation, British biographer Rose (Modigliani) examines her subject's work chronologically and fills out Valadon's doings with vignettes of Montmartre and of the artists she accepted as patrons or took as lovers. But the drama here comes less from Valadon's love and work than from her wayward son, whose artistic genius eclipsed her modest talent but whose destructive drunkenness forced Valadon to put him away, between paintings, in country madhouses. Rose's biography, which carefully if unexceptionally takes us to Valadon's death in 1938 at 72, tells the story of Utrillo's as well as his mother's life. B&w and color photos. (Feb.)