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Marie-Clémentine Valadon learned how to be an artist by working with artists. As a teenage circus performer living in Montmartre, she picked up side work posing for many of the most famous men of her time: Pierre-August Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas, among others.
She got the now-famous name “Suzanne” from one of these modeling jobs.
Toulouse-Lautrec wanted to paint her as the Biblical figure Susanna. Lautrec didn’t mean the name as a sweet compliment; “Susanna and the Elders” is a gruesome story about two men spying on a bathing woman and then attempting to blackmail her for sexual favors. Lautrec was referencing the older male painters leering over Marie-Clémentine’s “tawdry” reputation in Paris (she was a bastard daughter turned acrobat turned model; the rumors milled themselves).
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But Suzanne later took Lautrec’s nickname as her painting name — and built a lauded and lucrative career with it. She admired something else about the story of “Susanna and the Elders,” something Lautrec’s joking overlooked.
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