There is no certainty many can draw
from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s portrait of Suzanne Valadon, alone, propped in
ennui, at a table, a bottle of wine at both her leisure and sole company.
Is she a
regular? In what Paris haunt does she meet the inebriate state she’s bound to
meet? And if not that very state of intoxication, is she planning to meet
another to replace that intoxication with momentary flames?
So much can be drawn from a
portrait, particularly one of a woman who mothered the great Montmartre artist
Maurice Utrillo, at beck and call to Lautrec, to Jean Renoir, to Edgar Degas, all
of which could have been the possible father of Maurice, who’d developed an
abuse of his own for alcohol by the age of 10, presumably, at the very moment Lautrec’s
brush made congress with canvas, could have been in the depth of his many
wanderlusting fits, walking the streets of Paris, in utter displace of a boy of
his age.
But during that very portrait,
Valadon has no interest in Maurice’s whereabouts, nor her own; she’s unkept,
she has shredded the beauty the myth of Art History has passed down to us as heirlooms;
and where myth makes immortal, witnessing a vision in abstract depth reminds us
that before immortality was conceived, flesh and blood, trial and tribulation, bludgeoning
at the spearhead of blunt objects, strangulation by garotte, has all left their
mark as to remind us, no one reaches a timeless time without their time in
timeless torture.
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