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Where
Pompidou Center in Paris, Gallery 2, level 6
From 15 Jan to 26 May 2025
When
15 Jan. – 26 May 2025
11am – 9pm, every Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays
11am – 11pm, every Thursdays
Closed on tuesday and May 1st
👉 Buy tickets, €17 / Concessions €14
Booking strongly recommended
The Centre Pompidou in Paris is dedicating a monograph to Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938), an emblematic and daring artist, recognized as one of the most important of her generation. T his exhibition, which runs from January 15 to May 26, 2025, highlights Valadon’s unique journey, from her beginnings as a favorite model of all of Montmartre to her artistic recognition by her peers and critics. Valadon, who ardently defended the need to paint reality, places the nude, both female and male, at the center of her work, representing bodies without artifice or voyeurism.
The exhibition, the artist’s first monograph in Paris since that of the Musée National d’Art Moderne in 1967, was presented at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2023 , at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes in 2024, and at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in 2024. This version, enriched with new loans and augmented with unpublished archives, pays homage to this ostensibly modern artist, freed from the conventions of her time.
The exhibition of nearly 200 works draws on the wealth of national collections, notably that of the Centre Pompidou , the most important, but also of the Musée d’Orsay and the Orangerie . Exceptional loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Fondation de l’Hermitage and important private collections complete this presentation. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s two preferred mediums, drawing and painting, with an in-depth analysis of his graphic work thanks to the presentation of a large number of rarely shown drawings.
The exhibition includes five thematic sections: “Learning through observation”, “ Family portraits ”, “I paint people to get to know them”, “The real theory is imposed by nature” and “The nude: a feminine gaze”. A selection of works by her contemporaries, such as Juliette Roche, Georgette Agutte, Jacqueline Marval, Émilie Charmy and Angèle Delasalle, completes this proposal.
The exceptional archive collection bequeathed to the Centre Pompidou in 1974 by Dr. Robert Le Masle, a physician, collector and close friend of the artist, constitutes an essential testimony to Valadon’s rebellious personality and her early artistic recognition. The exhibition highlights the great freedom of this artist who did not truly adhere to any movement, except perhaps her own, and reveals her pioneering role in the birth of artistic modernity.
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