Suzanne Valadon and the male gaze

It’s intriguing how gender seems to redefine critical attitudes. Currently at the Barnes Foundation there is an exhibition of Suzanne Valadon, an exhibition that has received several favourable reviews. Quite why Valadon is praised is very revealing. The claim is that Valadon’s work views women differently to the male gaze. For example: 

Suzanne Valadon began artistic life as a model and, even before she left that career, she took up her employers’ tools and showed them how to look properly at women.

Ariella Budick, FT 11 Dec 2021

By the early 1920s, Valadon’s blazingly distinctive style had won her a steady income and a stellar reputation. Critics lauded her “masculine force” and “virile power”. She painted, one writer declared, “with an energy unheard of in a woman”. It’s hard to pin down what that gendered praise actually meant, since she eschewed the pink gauziness that some males (Renoir, say), slathered on the female body. There’s no sugariness to her nudes or marzipan in her flowers.

Ariella Budick, FT 11 Dec 2021 

Yet gendered praise seems a very apt description of the critics’ views of these paintings. Valadon is praised because she voids the male gaze ; but I can’t see, on the evidence of the images presented in the reviews, that Valadon presents an alternative view.  

Having both modelled, and painted models, Valadon offers viewers a unique re-reading of what a model is: her women do not jauntily eat breakfast outdoors in the nude, for example, but are doing a job by sitting in front of a painter. Some, perhaps, are waiting for the painter to arrive: “Blue Room” (1923) is a Matisse-like explosion of fabric, colour and flowers with, in the middle, a model prosaically puffing on a cigarette, staring off at an unseen person.

Judith Flanders, TLS, November 26, 202

The mention of Matisse is very appropriate, for I don’t see any distinction between the presentation of the female form between Matisse and Valadon. The nude above looks to me like a typical male gaze view. I’m all in favour of examining the male gaze and how it can be subverted, but on the evidence of the images shown in these reviews, I don’t think I would agree with the confidence with which these reviewers state Valadon has got beyond it. Laura Mulvey, who coined the term “male gaze” in 1975, certainly raised a way of thinking that can transform our view of visual art, but it’s rather facile simply to jump to the conclusion that because an artist is female her images therefore do not show the male gaze. Ways of seeing are not as simple to decipher as that.