Suzanne Valadon: Who is She?

Learn about this powerhouse of a female artist who defied all the odds and obstacles society threw at her. Her life story is set in poverty at the end of the 19th century in Montmartre, a hilltop suburb of Paris studded with nightclubs and cheap artist studios. She modeled for the greatest men of the day and learned her trade by watching them make art and manage their business. Suzanne was fearless, beautiful and talented at drawing…enough to win the grudging support of the art master, Edgar Degas. He would take her on as his protege, talking to art dealers about her and insist she first submit her work to the annual Paris Salon. She was miraculously (for a self-trained poor female) accepted and sold all her works. She would go on to hang in every Salon she entered afterwards.

Her life is the stuff of legends.

Before she died in 1938, the Louvre museum purchased five of her works and she was hailed as France’s greatest female artist. How did she do it? Why has she been ignored outside of France? Her first major institutional show in the USA was almost a hundred years after her death, in 2021.