Unlike her contemporaries, Suzanne Valadon was not content to paint pretty pictures typical of the works of art of her time. While other artists often painted people and scenes of everyday life at the turn of the century, Valadon painted with uncompromising sharpness and brutality. In this self-portrait, the bold red shades convey a sense of drama and emotion. The vibrant colors, applied in broad, loose brushstrokes, do not passively depict light and shadow, but actively express the artist’s strong inner personality.
Valadon used dramatic colors to breathe life into her portrait with rough texture and depth. The strong lines of the painting are evidence of Valadon’s belief that drawing is basic to painting. She used thick black lines on the eyebrows and collar to create a sense of strength and stoicism. The cropped composition further emphasizes the strong personality of the artist by filling the canvas with her image. The slightly off-center figure looks at the viewer with a piercing gaze. This challenging stare, coupled with the red tones used throughout the work, creates a powerful image.
For her portraits, Valadon disregarded convention—painting both beautiful and homely women, clothed and nude, from working-class communities. Her use of color and her bold representation of female sexuality challenged traditional male concepts of femininity. Through her use of strong lines, bold colors, and the cropped view, she projects an image of a strong woman during a particularly male-dominated society.
Just as her paintings challenged the norms, so did the artist’s entry into the art world. At age fifteen, Valadon became a circus acrobat, but a trapeze accident ended her career a year later. She then found work as an artist’s model and began to observe and learn artists’ techniques. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a French artist with whom she was romantically involved, brought her work to the attention of another established artist, Edgar Degas, who consistently encouraged her to develop her artistic talent and soon started to buy her works. These artists and their circle of friends in Paris at the turn of the century greatly influenced Valadon and her art.
British artist and art critic Roger Fry coined the term Post-Impressionism in 1910 to describe the development of French art from the late 1880s. Like the Impressionists, artists from this school used vivid colors, thick applications of paint, distinctive brushstrokes, and real-life subject matter, but continued to experiment with new ways of painting through the use of geometrical forms, the distortion of form for expressive effect, and the use of unnatural or arbitrary color. Although Valadon used elements of impressionism, her simplification of form and broad areas of pure color is typical of the work of many Post-Impressionists.
