The Blue Room

The Blue Room (La chambre bleue) is a 1923 painting by French artist Suzanne Valadon. One of her most recognizable works, it has been called a radical subversion of representation of women in art. Like many of Valadon's later works, it uses strong colors and emphasizes decorative backgrounds and patterned materials. Valadon depicts a modern 20th-century woman, clothed and smoking a cigarette, in a pose traditional to female nudes, particularly 19th-century images of odalisques and prostitutes, such as Edouard Manet's Olympia. The painting is in the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Social circumstances The stylistic decisions can be seen as a display of Valadon's view of society's changing social norms. The piece was created in a revolutionary time when gender roles and female independence came to the forefront of social discussion in Paris and elsewhere. After WWI, women's placement in society as objects to be escorted by men, fashioned by men, and overall constricted by men began to be replaced with a new kind of woman. Women began to make various strides in regards to fashion and social norms: wearing shorter, loose-fitting dresses, shorter bobbed hair, taking up traditionally male smoking habits, and purposefully pursuing education. Through Valadon's artistic decisions, she exemplifies the 20th-century woman as having more character unrelated to the previous male gaze. While her figure is the subject, the intimacies of her body are replaced by the intimacies of her unedited or unpolished living experience. Subversion of established techniques