An epic was, in ancient times, a long poem that told the story of a character, full of difficulties, until achieving success. This was the case of Marie-Clémentine Valadon, born in a lower-class family environment and who led an exceptional case of artistic emancipation. She became a famous model, portrayed by the best artists of her time, from Renoir to Toulouse-Lautrec. Self-taught, at the same time she learned from all these creators until she became an artist, under the name of Suzanne. Her career lasted from the end of the 19^th century until shortly before the Second World War. She was, quite possibly, the first artist to paint a nude male, a milestone that showed a highly defined personality. The portrait and the nude, especially female, would become the centre of gravity of her work, and also the creations that would give her prestige. Although attempts have been made to attribute her to various movements, hers is a completely unique work, where explicit influences from other artists coexisted with pictorial codes that were as personal as they were identifiable, the prerogative of a great artist. What follows is the epic of the model who struggled to be an artist, and succeeded in an all-male environment, and in the most difficult context, the cosmopolitan Montmartre of the pioneers of artistic modernity.

Valadon's artistic and personal ecosystem was the Montmartre of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, where she arrived with her mother at the age of five. She did a lot of different jobs and according to what she herself said, she would have also worked in a circus, a job she gave up due to a fall. Valadon would see Montmartre evolve from the "ground zero" of artistic modernity at the end of the 19^th century to the avant-garde of the early 20^th century: all kinds of "isms" happened in the few square metres of the Parisian neighbourhood, and which Valadon got to know first-hand. Among the artists from all over the world, Valadon coincided with some referents of Catalan art such as Santiago Rusiñol and Ramon Casas, who left fabulous paintings of Montmartre, but above all with Miquel Utrillo, who not only introduced her to these artists in Paris, but also with whom the painter maintained a relationship that marked her biography.

1.1. The legend of Suzanne and Erik

Despite being a legendary relationship, in reality it would have lasted only six months, between January and June 1893. Satie began the relationship with Valadon shortly after she had split up from Miquel Utrillo, a fact that meant at the same time the break up of two friends. Satie played the piano at the Auberge du Clou and lived on Rue Cortot, where Valadon moved. The relationship between the couple did not work out, apparently because of the jealous and excessive nature of the musician. As a plastic result, there is a famous portrait of Satie by Valadon - which he kept throughout his life. In the musical field, it gave rise to the famous Vexations by Satie, which he composed during the mourning process after the breakup with Biqui - as he affectionately called Valadon, which would have been the musician’s only known relationship.

1.2. The Bohemian Satie

Ramon Casas immortalised Satie, in front of the Moulin de la Galette, before becoming an internationally renowned artist, in the grey tones that characterised his best Parisian production. In the Museu Nacional there are a couple of preparatory drawings for this painting which is kept in the Northwestern University Library, and which was owned by the American collector Charles Deering. The composition represents the musician life-size and is, quite possibly, the best portrait that any artist has done of Satie, both for the quality and the symbolic force of its background.

Valadon met Miquel Utrillo in 1882, according to some versions, in Le Chat Noir. Utrillo formed part of the group of Catalan artists who lived in Paris, especially his intimate friends Santiago Rusiñol and Ramon Casas. The sentimental relationship with Valadon was tempestuous and, with a long interruption, lasted until 1893, when all contact between them disappeared. The relationship has been documented through several works but especially with the portraits that were made of each other. One of the works that Utrillo did, is known as “the portrait of the seven-year war", referring to the time it took Utrillo to legally recognise Valadon's son, the future painter Maurice Utrillo, after she had been asking him to do for seven years.

2.1. Chinese shadows

Apart from attending the shows and having illustrated the cover of some brochures, Valadon became the image of an advertising element of Chinese shadows, a poster produced by Utrillo himself, linked to the Théâtre d'Ombres Parisiennes. Utrillo became a great expert in venues such as Le Chat Noir or the Auberge du Clou, in Paris, but he would later export them to the United States and to Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona, where he would be the soul of these activities.

Although she did many and varied jobs, Valadon started modelling when she was about fifteen years old. Her face and body became among the most iconic in the iconography of modernity, to the point of being immortalised by creators of different generations: Puvis de Chavannes, Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, André Utter, Steinlen, but also of Catalans, such as Rusiñol and Utrillo, among others. Valadon, self-taught, while working as a model, was able to see the work of these artists in their sancta santorum, with their rudiments, resources and secrets. Degas added the appellation of terrible in reference to her strong personality, on the other hand necessary to make the transition from model to artist in the midst of a competitive and male context, not favourable for a woman and, even, lower class.

3.1. The female figure and mass culture

Although Valadon became one of the most requested models by artists for their oil paintings and drawings, she was also the protagonist in some advertising posters. Posters were beginning to fill the walls of Paris and so many other cities around the world, to promote all kinds of commercial products. They mostly included women, whether they were models or stereotypes. The posters, often produced by first-rate artists, were often of a high artistic quality. In this selection of posters from the Cabinet of Drawings and Engravings of the Museu Nacional - which preserves a significant number - the central role of the female figure in the full bloom of mass culture can be clearly seen.

While still modelling, almost everyone was unaware that Valadon herself drew. She was immensely influenced by her seven years modelling for Puvis de Chavannes, but it was Degas who most noticed her talent and recommended that she continue down that path. It was he who taught her to engrave in his own studio and even became a collector of her works. Most of the drawings and engravings from Valadon's early years - oil painting came later - almost all of them with scenes of toilettes or of a certain intimacy, clearly evoked the work of Degas. The death of the French artist, in 1917, represented a hard blow for Valadon, after all he was one of the few artists who supported her at the beginning, when Degas was already a living legend.

The self-portrait normally projects a certain component of self-affirmation of the artist, but this is extraordinarily re-dimensioned in the case of a woman who had previously been a model and, moreover, in a highly masculinised profession in the context of the end of the 19^th century. Valadon's self-portraits can be interpreted as a kind of re-appropriation of the self-image, until then shaped and monopolised by male artists. It is no coincidence that a self-portrait in pastel made at the age of eighteen, in 1883, is considered to be her first signed work. Valadon worked on self-portraits using oil, pastel and pencil, and in some cases they even appeared integrated in compositions representing family groups. Without being a genre too cultivated by Valadon, it paradoxically played a central role in her life and work, so that, as a whole, they showed her evolution from adolescence to old age.

Valadon's artistic interests were very diverse, but it is worth highlighting a very personal look at female intimacy. The deployment of this theme is projected in various directions, from the first drawings and engravings of the toilettes to large nudes and odalisques. In another area of intimacy are scenes including women, usually domestic and in secluded or closed spaces and men never appeared. They were usually women alone or in pairs, who carried out some activity or were socialising, but always characterised by atmospheres of full complicity. This became an experimental field of the first order, often with slightly elevated perspectives that created a certain sensationalism. The chromaticisms, always vivid and often strident, revealed to us an absolutely personal universe, with scenes where the strength of the brushstroke was combined with the lyricism inherent in intimacy.

6. 1. The art gallery of a vital mosaic

Portrait was Valadon's genre par excellence and, at the same time, the one that brought her prestige and recognition, beyond the fact that she also cultivated landscape and still life. Several typologies were distinguished, where portraits of her partners and relatives stood out, sometimes in groups. In another area we could find the portraits of more or less famous personalities from the artistic ecosystem, such as art critics or collectors. Many of them were commitments to do portraits or even commissioned portraits, actually bourgeois portraits that revealed the status acquired by Valadon, not only in the professional sphere but also in the social sphere. Although influences could be recognised in her portraits, the adoption of very personal codes meant that the Valadon style was always observed, characterised by its thick profiles and attractive chromaticisms.

6. 2. Still lifes

Paradoxically, the still lifes that were a genre traditionally reserved for female artists, in the case of Valadon, she did not cultivate them until her maturity, when her career was already fully consolidated. Still lifes appeared, above all, during the First World War and proliferated in the decade of the 1920s. In any case, the presence of still lifes had already been very common as a background or complement to her portraits, as well as in many of her nudes. With a pictorial language that evoked creations by Van Gogh and Matisse, these vibrant chromatic paintings conveyed large doses of sensuality.

The female nude became a structural theme of Valadon's maturity, not only because of the number of works she created, but because it became a testing ground of the first magnitude, experimenting with all kinds of perspectives and positions. These were scenes where the highest level of intimacy was achieved, common at the time, but not so much from a female authorship, let alone with such an explicit sexuality. It was very possibly in the treatment of nudes where Valadon's work prevailed over that of other contemporary artists, from a naturalness that escaped any previous stereotype, as was often the case with the female nude. Experimentation around body language became a space of refuge and struggle in the midst of a masculine artistic environment, and it was where some of her best creations appeared. Paradoxically, with the nudes – more than with the portraits – there was a reversal of position, so that the previous model was placed on the other side of the easel, leaving the models in the position she had occupied in the past.

7. 1. Odalisques

Within the theme of nudes, but with other connotations and, even more ambitiously, Valadon carried out a series of paintings of women leaning on sofas or divans which, according to most experts, probably marked the peak of her production. They were characterised by their orientalist resonances with unequal doses of sensuality depending on the work. The decorative sense stood out, with exuberant fabrics and floral motifs becoming the protagonists, reminiscent of creations by Matisse or Bonnard. In these compositions, she alternated naked female bodies with dresses, sometimes within the same work, in search of a contrasting effect, as she had already done in her drawings and engravings.

7.2. The Black Venus

The female nude was one of the landmarks in this Black Venus, of which she painted at least five variants, all during 1919. The title Black Venus appeared on the back of one of the canvases, written by the artist herself. Venus evoked the goddess of fertility and love, so the component of racialisation was added to the sexualisation of women. These stereotypes were cultivated by several contemporary artists in the context of a colonial power such as France, as a way of exoticism with great commercial output. But it was by no means easy to extract an interpretation of what would have been Valadon's intimate approach to the subject, not only because of her status as an old model, but because of the fact that it was a cycle that opened and closed with these five works.