Assignment for Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Suzanne Valadon, The Blue Room, 1923. Oil on Canvas

Your assignment for Wednesday, June 11, 2014 is to read to pages 151 and be ready to discuss the major content areas.

Vocabulary words to note for tomorrow:
Emphasis, Subordination, Abstract
Negative Space, Pattern, Rhythm
Randomness, Rhythm, Composition,
Foreground, Middle Ground, Back Ground

Suzanne Valadon: French painter, model, 1865-1938

"French painter and printmaker. Born in Bessines, Haute-Vienne, Valadon came to Paris as a baby with her seamstress mother. Early on she learned dressmaking, worked as a circus acrobat, and had a son, Maurice Utrillo. Her first contact with art came through modeling for Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec. Without formal art training, she began to draw and when Toulouse-Lautrec showed these drawings to Degas, he was sufficiently impressed to arrange a professional exhibition. The many shows and sales which followed brought Valadon financial security, especially after 1924 when the dealer Bernheim-Jeune showed her work regularly. Between 1927 and 1932 she had four major retrospectives and took part in the Salons of Modern Women Artists 1933–8. As an ‘independent’, untouched by avant-garde modernism, her conventional landscapes, still lifes, and flower paintings nevertheless included symbolic, personal references, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, though she frequently painted the figure, she avoided conventional voyeurism."

Schubert, Gudrun. "Valadon, Suzanne." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, 2012

Format

Oil paint, Canvas, 35 3/8 x 45 5/8 inches (90 x 116 cm)

Relation

Post-Impressionist

Description

This self-portrait of Valadon displays the artist lounging on a daybed covered in blue and white floral sheets. She is wearing striped lounge pants and a pink camisole. Her hands are at her sides, and a cigarette dangles from her mouth. She is voluptuous, peaches and cream, and feminine. At her bare feet lay two books. She is gazing off to the right, avoiding the viewer, as if caught in reverie.

Type

Still Image

Citation

Valadon, Suzanne, “The Blue Room (Self-Portrait by Suzanne Valadon),” Élan Vital, accessed June 10, 2014, http://elanvital.omeka.net/items/show/17.