Maria of Montmartre

Simply as one of Montmartre's favorite models of the 1880s and 1890s, the petite ex-trapeze artist named Marie-Clementine Valadon would have remained a fascinating creature. Her striking features, intense blue eyes and mocking impudence attracted most of the painters of her youth, from Puvis de Chavannes to Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. But because Marie-Clementine gave birth to Maurice Utrillo, one of the century's most successful, eccentric and curiously talented painters, her fame as model and mother has largely obscured another passion she fiercely nourished: to be an artist in her own right.

Last week Suzanne Valadon (as she signed her work) was gaining posthumous recognition with her first solo show in the U.S.A collection of 60 prints and drawings at Manhattan's Peter H. Deitsch Gallery left little doubt that, within the narrow limits she set herself, she had succeeded brilliantly in creating what she wished, not "beautiful drawings designed to be framed, but good drawings, which capture a moment of life in movement--all intensity."

Model's Secret. Born the illegitimate daughter of a hard-working peasant woman, Suzanne Valadon was raised in the Paris streets like countless gamins, working as a seamstress, waitress, vegetable seller, and drawing for pleasure on the sidewalks with pieces of coal. Tradition has it that she first caught the eye of Painter Puvis de Chavannes when she delivered his laundry. Struck by her slim figure and natural grace, he made her the model for all the figures (both male and female) in his most celebrated painting, The Sacred Wood. Other assignments soon followed. Auguste Renoir used her as the model for his contrasting pictures, Country Dance and City Dance. Toulouse-Lautrec's drawing of her, Gueule de Bois (The Hangover), so attracted Van Gogh that he wrote his brother, eagerly inquiring: "Has De Lautrec finished his picture of the woman leaning on her elbows on a little table in a cafe?"

Renoir was the first to discover his model's secret. When Suzanne failed to show up for a sitting one day, Renoir went to her room. Finding her drawing a self-portrait in pastels, Renoir exclaimed in astonishment: "You, too?" Lautrec also praised her work, saw to it that she met the great, testy French master, Edgar Degas, who had seen her as an acrobat at Place Pigalle's Molier Circus before a bad fall finished her brief career. Degas in turn was delighted. Said he: "You are one of us." Recalled Suzanne, years later: "That day I had wings."

"That She-Devil." Neither the birth of an illegitimate son, Maurice,* when Suzanne was 18, nor her subsequent turbulent love affairs checked her career. Under Degas' tutelage, Suzanne improved her drawing and learned the technique of drypoint etching. She did most of her drawing at home, finding her ideal subjects in the figures of maids, charwomen and women friends whom she sketched, usually bathing. Degas, astonished at her natural talent, hung her work in his dining room, once chided her: "That she-devil of a Maria, what talent she has . . . Why do you show me nothing more?"

Marriage to a well-to-do lawyer gave Suzanne her first taste of luxury. When the marriage broke up, she took as her lover (and later husband) the painter Andre Utter. 21 years her junior and the drinking companion of her tosspot son, and moved in her aging mother. In her Family Portrait (see cut), painted in a flat style she learned from Gauguin's oils, she left a record of one of the most scandalizing and yet financially successful households in French art history.

Mad Decade. Utter turned business manager and made Utrillo's work, done between drinking bouts and trips to the sanitarium, what Utter rightly called "The greatest commercial operation of the century." With the francs rolling in, the "Trinite Maudite" (Damned Trinity) set off on a decade's mad spending spree. Suzanne fed filet mignon to her dogs, canned sardines to her cats, hired a taxi to wait outside the house by the day, finally bought her own limousine and hired a white-uniformed chauffeur. When her new astrakhan coat seemed too heavy, she threw it on the floor for the dogs.

Such wild extravagance came to an end with the Depression '30s. By the time Utrillo married in 1935, Suzanne had become a hunched figure of an old woman. But on her 70th birthday, three years before she died in 1938, Suzanne still had her old spirit. Her toast at her own party was a rousing "vive l'amour!"

* Whose probable father was an insurance clerk and alcoholic Montmartre habitue named Boissy. Maurice did not acquire his surname Utrillo, given him by a friendly Spanish journalist, Miguel Utrillo, until he was eight.

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