An unknown father had impregnated a seamstress from Limousin, who gave birth to a girl named Marie-Clémentine, and at the age of 14 this girl ran away to Paris and was lost like a dog without a collar through the streets of Montmartre, stealing fruit and bottles of milk at stops to survive. One day she was approached by a circus manager. “Hey, girl, wouldn’t you like to be an acrobat? If you accept, you’ll be dressed in pink gauze and sequins standing on a white horse riding at a gallop.” The idea seduced him. This is how Toulouse-Lautrec saw her work at the Mollier circus. He was the first to draw it. The painters Degas, Renoir, Puvis de Chavannes and other artists also passed through the circus and painted their debrided apple breasts on the corset.
The girl liked the lights, the applause and the bohemian friends with whom she spent the night in the tavern in front of a hunting lodge. Unprepared, one day she climbed the mast, grabbed the rings, and while performing a somersault, she fell onto the circus ring and was left half broken. It didn’t take him long to recover. He then tried his luck by offering himself as an artists’ model. She was beautiful, had a nice figure and was accepted by Puvis de Chavannes, a symbolist painter, who would become her jealous and loving protector. For her part, the young woman learned to paint, but that was her secret passion. He absorbed the craft of other painters while posing for them. Renoir had painted her drying her hair and dancing with a flower hat; Toulouse-Lautrec had drawn her sitting, her hand on her chin in front of a bottle and a glass, her mouth bitter, her eyes cloudy; Degas had immortalized her tying her ballet slipper, but of all of them, who had gotten her pregnant?
It was assumed that it had been Puvis de Chavannes, an old man that everyone in Montmartre made fun of, because the girl was only 16 years old when she gave birth. The father could also have been Renoir, a sensual man who painted very carnal women. Or Toulouse-Lautrec, who on her way back from her modeling sessions or from having a piece of bread sprinkled with red wine at the Posada del Clove, where her friend Erik Satie played the piano, the girl found a bouquet of Lautrec’s flowers on her doorstep with a note: “Good for a few glasses of vitriol.” Whoever was responsible, history repeated itself.
An unknown man had impregnated her mother and in turn this daughter gave birth, the fruit of an unknown lover, to a son that the world would know by the name of Maurice Utrillo. It was December 26, 1883. “A bad Christmas gift I gave my mother that day,” said the lost drunk painter 20 years later. One day Toulouse-Lautrec discovered the oil paintings and drawings that the girl secretly made at night. He was fascinated by its expressive force, by its realism. He showed them to friends. “Let’s see if you know who they belong to?” They belonged to that young girl. Then Lautrec wanted to change its name. She could never be a good painter if she was called Marie-Clémentine. Since she posed naked for old people, he proposed the name Suzanne. After being baptized with absinthe in the middle of a great party, she would henceforth be called Suzanne Valadon. That drunken party was attended by a silent guy who didn’t move from a corner. He had a cloth under his arm and since no one deigned to speak to him, he vanished without saying goodbye. It was Vincent van Gogh.
Her son Maurice, still without a surname, was in the care of his grandmother and was already a violent alcoholic at the age of twelve. “Wolves can’t give birth to lambs,” the mother thought. At that time Suzanne had a very rich young lawyer as a lover, who forced her to lead a bourgeois life, but she did not want to take care of that problematic creature, who painted pictures of the streets of Montmartre and exchanged them for a bottle of wine. It was a former admirer, Miguel Utrillo y Morlius, a Catalan engineer, art critic and cultural promoter, who agreed out of compassion to give the boy his last name to see if he would stop drinking and on February 27, 1891, in the mayor’s office of the Ninth District of Paris, he signed the acknowledgment of paternity in the register, witnessed by an employee and a waiter who was passing by. From that moment on, the legend of Maurice Utrillo began, who would be the glory and torment of his mother.
When they asked her if she remembered the old days with the painters Lautrec, Renoir, Degas, Puvis de Chavannes, she responded: “They were all idiots, but it’s funny, I never stop thinking about them.” Suzanne Valadon died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 72, on April 7, 1938 in the ambulance that was taking her to the clinic. That trapeze artist girl had taken the triple somersault: being a famous painter with million-dollar prices, giving birth to a genius and the two of them going down in history together.