La Chambre bleue

Suzanne Valadon knew the reclining-woman pose from the other side. Before she painted, she had modeled nude for Renoir, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, the woman on the couch rather than the one holding the brush. By 1923 she was a successful painter in her own right, and here she took that old odalisque pose and changed almost everything about it. The woman lies back in a blue room, but she is dressed in striped pajama trousers, a cigarette between her lips, a couple of books near her feet, paying the viewer no attention at all. There is no nudity offered up and no invitation. Valadon was in her late fifties when she made it, working in flat, saturated color and the heavy dark outlines she favored in her later years.