1923, Suzanne Valadon, The Blue Room -- Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (Barcelona) (special exhibition)
From the exhibition label: The Blue Room, from 1923, was acquired by the French state the year after it was painted, the first by the artist. It depicts a modern-day Olympia, smoking and reading -- the presence of the books is no coincidence -- and it moves away from the orientalising decorativism of other nudes. The fact that she is dressed, a certain obesity and her distant, blasé attitude strip her of any kind of eroticism, and in a single work she seems to want to reverse all the stereotypes she herself had represented in the past.
1923, Suzanne Valadon, The Blue Room -- Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (Barcelona) (special exhibition)
From the exhibition label: The Blue Room, from 1923, was acquired by the French state the year after it was painted, the first by the artist. It depicts a modern-day Olympia, smoking and reading -- the presence of the books is no coincidence -- and it moves away from the orientalising decorativism of other nudes. The fact that she is dressed, a certain obesity and her distant, blasé attitude strip her of any kind of eroticism, and in a single work she seems to want to reverse all the stereotypes she herself had represented in the past.