Brushed aside
Renoir’s Dancer celebrates an incredible woman, so what’s he got to do with it?
The prologue to this long and well-illustrated biography suggests the author’s main theme. She will celebrate an extraordinary woman who “surmounted the constraints of class and gender” to make her place in the world and become a renowned artist. But this leaves me with an awkward question. How come Catherine Hewitt has devised a title that identifies this woman only in terms of a man? And how come she calls it a “secret” life, when Suzanne Valadon’s work has been celebrated in many books and exhibitions, often enough to make her a proto-feminist icon?
Valadon was born the illegitimate child of a washerwoman in provincial France. Her mother took her to Paris. Trading on her red-haired beauty, Valadon became the paid model of a string of illustrious artists. Puvis de Chavannes painted her as an angel. Renoir three times depicted her as a dancer and once as a voluptuous, silky-skinned nude. Toulouse-Lautrec, with grim realism, painted her as a drinker, bleakly coping with a hangover.
In the Montmartre milieu she loved, Valadon had plenty of affairs. It may have been by one of these artists that she became pregnant at the age of 18. Or maybe not. The chap who stepped up to claim paternity and give her some legal protection was a Spaniard called Utrillo, so her son was called Maurice Utrillo.
In the midst of all this, Valadon began painting and drawing herself. The big turn came when this working-class woman, with no formal training in art, hesitantly approached artist Edgar Degas and asked him what he thought of her portfolio. Notorious for his snobbery and his ready put-downs of people he regarded as inferiors, Degas, amazingly, took one look at her work and told her she was a real artist.
Of all the men in this book, he comes off best. Degas did not have sexual relations with Valadon, but guided her as a reliable mentor and never suggested she was butting into the male world of art.
Of course, there’s much more to this story. Valadon’s alcoholic and erratic son himself became a canonical artist and she spent many years protecting him from the consequences of his wild binges. She had a mad, brief affair with the composer Erik Satie. She married a bourgeois sugar daddy to give her financial support, but the marriage turned to custard. Later, she married a man her son’s age; that too went west. But throughout this, she painted, and Hewitt makes a good case for her greatness as an artist.
The illustrations handily back her up.
But I still have my awkward question. Why on earth call this gossipy, namedropping life Renoir’s Dancer? Renoir had only a brief connection with Valadon, early in her career. Why not call it Satie’s Lover? Or Degas’s Protégée? Or even Utrillo’s Mum? All these men were more important to Valadon than Renoir. It seems a way of drawing in a readership by using the name of a more famous artist, but it has the effect of diminishing the book’s real protagonist.