Joy of Life (Suzanne Valadon)

Suzanne Valadon's Joy of Life depicts a landscape with four nude and seminude women who are watched by a nude man.[3] The nude male was modeled by Valadon's lover, André Utter.[4] They met through her son, Maurice Utrillo, and Utter modeled nude for several of Valadon's paintings, including Adam and Eve (1909) and Casting the Net (1914).[4]

Joy of Life is based on the theme of "women as nature," a typical subject at the time.[1] Gill Perry has argued that the painting reworks the theme of bathers in nature.[3] She notes that the women "seem strangely separate from each other, the male viewer and from the nature that surrounds them," which suggests a "more ambiguous, dislocated relationship with both nature and the male spectator."[3] Perry's reading is echoed by Patricia Mathews, who has described the figures as being in nature, but not equivalent to nature.[1] She suggests that the male viewer "has no other role in the painting except as this near-caricature of the dominating male gaze," as the women are unaware of being watched.[5] Rosemary Betterton has argued that the figures disrupt the male gaze and are, in fact, being caught in a moment without being sexualized.[1] According to Mathews, the painting does not offer the "coherent narrative that so clearly dominated masculinist images."[5] Valadon's Joy of Life, Mathews has noted, is consistent with the ways in which "various narratives intersect in her work in often uncomfortable ways to dislodge and destabilize conventional gendered interpretations."[5] In Casting the Net, completed three years later, Valadon actually reversed the traditional active male/passive female concept by casting the nude male in the role of object.[6]