Il lancio della rete

In the spring of 1914, months before the war began, Suzanne Valadon showed this enormous canvas at the Salon des Independants in Paris. It is about ten feet wide, and it did something almost no one else was doing. Three naked young men cast a fishing net from a riverbank. They are all the same man, her lover and model Andre Utter, shown three times as the body moves. Valadon had spent years as a model herself, watched by male painters, and here she turns that around and makes a man the object of the gaze, treated with the frank admiration usually reserved for women. The size alone drew notice, and some of it was hostile. This was the last time she painted a male nude on this scale, afterwards turning mostly to women and children. The picture now hangs in the fine arts museum in Nancy, in eastern France.