Suzanne Valadon Quotes | Famous Quotations About Art & Life

Suzanne Valadon was a French painter and artists' model who is known for her ground-breaking figure paintings, regularly of female nudes.

Suzanne Valadon Famous Quotations include:

• Quotes About Art
• Quotes About Life
• The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon

Suzanne Valadon Quotes About Art

“I paint with the stubbornness I need for living, and I've found that all painters who love their art do the same.” ― Suzanne Valadon

Diego Rivera Quotes

 

The Blue Room Painting by Suzanne Valadon

Suzanne Valadon Quotes About Life

“I had great masters. I took the best of them of their teachings, of their examples. I found myself, I made myself, and I said what I had to say.” ― Suzanne Valadon

“I paint people to learn to know them.” ― Suzanne Valadon

The Secret Life Of Suzanne Valadon: Renoir's Dancer Quotes

“Then, at last, Madeleine’s luck turned. She came across Montmartre. With its windmills, its clear air, and the old-fashioned, village feel of its higgledy-piggledy houses perched on a slope, few places recalled the Limousin countryside so vividly as Montmartre.

It was up to 129 meters above sea level at the highest point. Why, with its narrow, winding streets and alleys, and its cottages clinging to the hillside, a person could have believed themselves in Le Mas Barbu. The bustling Rue Lepic and the Place des Abbesses readily called to mind Bessines’ town square on a busy market day. And all around, steep, grassy banks rose up protectively, hillside homes bloomed with flowers, old men installed in wrought iron chairs sat outside doorways and set the world to rights, children played in the street and women chatted and gossiped as they made their way to fill baskets with provisions.

At last, Madeleine had found somewhere familiar, reassuring, comforting. Montmartre felt like home.”

― Catherine Hewitt, Renoir's Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon

Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes

 

Portrait of Maurice Utrillo Painting by Suzanne Valadon

“Like alcohol and coffee, the song had been cast as the faithful servant of political opposition when Louis-Napoleon came to power. Singing in cafés was consequently one of the first forms of expression outlawed under his regime. However, when a series of decrees in the 1860s had lifted many of the restrictions imposed on entertainment venues (notably by permitting the use of props, costumes, and music), café-concerts had begun to flourish.

By the 1880s, there were over 200 such venues belting out hearty songs about working-class life across Paris. Along with the usual facilities of a café, café-concerts also offered a small indoor stage or a covered pavilion outside were singers, and sometimes acrobats and comedians, performed for an often raucous audience.

Patrons paid more than they would in a standard café, either in the form of an entrance fee or through elevated drinks prices. But many judged the supplement worthwhile; the atmosphere was relaxed, the singers, though not first-rate, were undeniable ‘of the people’, and unlike theatre-goers, audience members could also smoke. And as one guidebook writer exclaimed with surprise, ‘sometimes, one can actually hear quite good music.”

― Catherine Hewitt, Renoir's Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon

“Rodolphe Salis was a tall, red-headed bohemian with a coppery beard and boundless charisma. He had tried and failed to make a success of several different careers, including painting decorations for a building in Calcutta. But by 1881 he was listless and creatively frustrated, uncertain where his niche might lie. More pressingly, he was desperate to secure a steady income.

But then he had the ingenious idea to turn the studio which he rented, a disused post office on the resolutely working-class Boulevard de Rochechouart, into a cabaret with a quirky, artistic bent. He was not the first to attempt such a venture: La Grande Pinte on the Avenue Trudaine had been uniting artists and writers to discuss and give spontaneous performances for several years. But Salis was determined that his initiative would be different – and better. A fortuitous meeting ensured that it was.

Poet Émile Goudeau was the founder of the alternative literary group the Hydropathes (‘water-haters’ – meaning that they preferred wine or beer). After meeting Goudeau in the Latin Quarter and attending a few of the group’s gatherings, Salis became convinced that a more deliberate form of entertainment than had been offered at La Grande Pinte would create a venue that was truly innovative – and profitable. The Hydropathe members needed a new meeting place, and so Salis persuaded Goudeau to rally his comrades and convince them to relocate from the Latin Quarter to his new cabaret artistique. They would be able to drink, smoke, talk and showcase their talents and their wit. Targeting an established group like the Hydropathes was a stroke of genius on Salis’s part. Baptizing his cabaret Le Chat Noir after the eponymous feline of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, he made certain that his ready-made clientele were not disappointed.

Everything about the ambiance and the decor reflected Salis’s unconventional, anti-establishment approach, an ethos which the Hydropathes shared. A seemingly elongated room with low ceilings was divided in two by a curtain. The front section was larger and housed a bar for standard customers. But the back part of the room (referred to as ‘L’Institut’) was reserved exclusively for artists.

Fiercely proud of his locality, Salis was adamant that he could make Montmartre glorious. ‘What is Montmartre?’ Salis famously asked. ‘Nothing. What should it be? Everything!’ Accordingly, Salis invited artists from the area to decorate the venue. Adolphe Léon Willette painted stained-glass panels for the windows, while Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen created posters. And all around, a disorientating mishmash of antiques and bric-a-brac gave the place a higgledy-piggledy feel. There was Louis XIII furniture, tapestries and armour alongside rusty swords; there were stags’ heads and wooden statues nestled beside coats of arms. It was weird, it was wonderful and it was utterly bizarre – the customers loved it.”

― Catherine Hewitt, Renoir's Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon 

Chaim Soutine Quotes

 

Adam and Eve Painting By Suzanne Valadon 

“For many country folks, the railway was Paris. Its gleaming tracks brought tales of success, prosperity, and realized dreams to the provinces, qualities with which the capital was increasingly seen as synonymous. For a countrywoman like Madeleine, short on money and luck, overworked, and whose future appeared only to offer more of the same, those dazzling steel tracks represented a chance. All at once, resignation turned to hope. Suddenly, Madeleine could see clearly.

If she stayed in Business, her future was mapped out – and it was bleak. But if she boarded the train to Paris, anything was possible – perhaps even happiness. Jeanne and Widow Guimbaud were horrified when, not five years after Marie-Clémentine’s birth, Madeleine announced that her mind was made up: she was going to start a new life in Paris.”

― Catherine Hewitt, Renoir's Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon

“Increasingly, a new generation of artists were finding the creative projects which so excited them systematically rebuffed by the official art bodies. It was exasperating. Did the jury of the Salon, that ‘great event’ of the artistic world, never tire of the tedious repertoire of historical events and myths that had formed the mainstay of Salon paintings for so long?

Did they not feel ridiculed being sold the blatant lie of highly finished paint surfaces, of bodies without a blemish, of landscapes stripped of all signs of modernity? Was contemporary life, the sweat, and odor of real men and women, not deserving of a place on the Salon walls?

Young artists huddled around tables in Montmartre’s cafés, sharing their deepest frustrations, breathing life into their most keenly held ideas. Just a few streets away from the Cimetière de Montmartre, Édouard Manet, the enfant terrible of the contemporary art world, could be found at his regular table in the Café Guerbois surrounded by reverent confrères, who would in time become famous in their own right. When Manet spoke, his blue eyes sparkled, his body leaned forwards persuasively, and an artistic revolution felt achievable.

The atmosphere was electric, the conversation passionate – often heated, but always exciting. The discussions ‘kept our wits sharpened,’ Claude Monet later recalled, ‘they encouraged us with stores of enthusiasm that for weeks and weeks kept us up.’ And though the war caused many of the artists to leave the capital, it proved merely a temporary migration. At the time Madeleine and her daughters arrived in Montmartre, the artists had firmly marked their patch.”

― Catherine Hewitt, Renoir's Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon

“It was an exhilarating time to be involved in the art world, in any capacity. At last, individualism was encouraged, not condemned. By the 1880s, Impressionism was yesterday’s news. Artists had already gone beyond it and we're experimenting with new forms, content, and techniques.

Diversity was the modus vivendi. Accordingly, the 1880s Paris became the birthplace of some radically different movements, including Divisionism, Symbolism, Synthesism, and Nabis. Furthermore, the proliferation of alternative exhibiting bodies offered real grounds for hope for avant-garde painters and those hailing from the fringes of society.

The Salon was no longer the sole and hazardous rite of passage lying between a painter and success. There were no other organizations where reputations could be forged, such as the Société des Aquarellistes Français. But by far the most notable and innovative artistic venture in 1884 was the Salon des Artistes Indépendants.

When his technically daring composition Bathers at Asnières (1884) was rejected by the jury of the 1884 Salon, a former pupil of the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts Georges Seurat was spurred to retaliate.

Joining forces with a number of other disgruntled painters, among them Symbolist Odilon Redon and self-taught artist Albert Dubois-Pillet, Seurat helped found the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants. With Redon acting as chairman, the group proposed to do something unprecedented: they would mount a show whose organizers were not answerable to any official institution, and where there would be no prizes and, significantly, no jury.

The venture introduced a radically new concept onto the Parisian art scene: freedom. The first exhibition, the Salon des Artistes Indépendants, was held from May to July in a temporary building in the Jardin des Tuileries near the Louvre.”

― Catherine Hewitt, Renoir's Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon

Wassily Kandinsky Quotes

 

Casting the Net Painting by Suzanne Valadon

 

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