Antiphon
Susan Valadon was the mother of a minor Impressionist, more famous than she. Or, he was her son. Susan was both artist and artist's model: before we have even laid eyes on her work, Rosemary Valadon's choice of name situates her, the female artist, as both subject and object, in a position of control but also, perhaps, surrender. It's a risky business, especially as her own object is that most traditional support of the male gaze, the female body (where the male body is represented here, it takes its place in strict relation to the female, itself no minor achievement). The female body is subjected to degrees of representation, from the apparent realism of the Golden Bath series through its breakdown in the Dream and Antiphon, to the funky poster-style of the Charades. The risk that Valadon runs is precisely the loss of control: it's "her" body to represent as she sees fit, but the male viewer remains a problem.
It seems to this male viewer that Valadon opens the risk out and runs it, for all it's worth, successfully. The question, "what will he make of this body?", is always countered: what will it make out of him?
Of the works in pastels, the Golden Bath series offers the most apparently straightforward representations of the female torso. But even here a satisfied or proprietary (male) gaze is diverted: on the second look which the images insist upon, the outlines of the body, although they never disappear, shift in a play of colour and shadow, contrasted against strongly-drawn hands. Hands are perhaps more usually the instruments of a masculine, self-distancing pleasure: the minimal, yet clearly self-pleasuring gesture of
Rosemary Valadon, Antiphon VI, 1988.
