There is only one English-language biography of the French artist Suzanne Valadon — Renoir’s Dancer, a title that doubtless thrilled the marketing department of its publisher, Icon Books. Valadon was indeed a major model and muse, and sat endlessly for the already famous Renoir, but in her lifetime she also became a serious and feted artist in her own right.

Now, as a robust exhibition at Centre Pompidou-Metz deftly demonstrates, though she posed in a frothy white ballgown for Renoir’s “Danse à la ville”, as the hard-faced girl in Toulouse-Lautrec’s “The Hangover”, and as a sensual siren for Puvis de Chavannes, it is her vibrant paintings, as well as her drawings and etchings, that deserve our attention.

Valadon, who lived from 1865 to 1938, painted without inhibition or flattery, cleaving to a brilliantly hued realism. Her self-portraits are searing observations of womanhood — in the last of them she is a tough, bare-breasted 66-year-old. Those commissioned by society and friends, from which she made a good living in the 1920s and 1930s, are equally unforgiving. Lucie Valore, a wealthy collector, is shown as puffy and stern. By 1937, when it was painted, she had married Valadon’s son, the painter Maurice Utrillo, and was about to turn him against her.

Even close family members don’t escape Valadon’s forensic gaze. In a portrait of her niece Maria Coca and daughter Gilberte, made in 1913, the sitters face in opposite directions and a pall of misery infuses the picture.

At the Pompidou, director Chiara Parisi, who also curated the show, has taken an art-historical view of the artist’s career, and interspersed the assemblage of 130 works by Valadon with a further 40 by her peers. “I wanted to put her in context,” says Parisi. Among them are a gorgeous still life by Cézanne, with whom Valadon shares a palette of saturated colours, and a sensational portrait of Valadon by Toulouse-Lautrec, who was also her lover; it was buried in a store in Wuppertal, Germany, until Parisi dug it out.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s influence can be seen in works such as Valadon’s “Nude in Boots”, a quick study of a confident showgirl naked but for her stockings and boots. Lautrec also gave her the name Suzanne, although she was really called Marie-Clémentine: the new name was after the biblical parable of Susanna and the Elders, alluding to the amount of time she spent with older men.

Parisi didn’t want to hang Valadon’s appeal on her rollicking rags-to-riches-to-rags life story — such a sensational tale of its times that it reads like the plot of a Zola novel. Valadon came to Paris from the poor, rural Limousin region aged five with her unmarried mother Madeleine. They landed in Montmartre where Suzanne ran riot, played truant and really did join the circus.

By the age of 15, she had tumbled disastrously off her trapeze and, after recovering, started making a living as an artist’s model, most notably for Puvis de Chavannes. She had her son Maurice at 18 (fellow artist Miquel Utrillo claimed paternity, though society preferred Chavannes), who went on to be blighted by alcohol and mental illness but became a very successful artist.

By 19, she had started making her own drawings, then Edgar Degas taught her etching. An affair with the overly obsessive Erik Satie (who gets a tiny corner here) was followed by marriage to a stockbroker. But eventually André Utter, a 23-year-old friend of Maurice, swept her away (she was 44), managed her career and spent her money. As did Valadon herself, with a penchant for furs, chauffeur-driven cars and lavish dinners.

Utter also made appalling pornographic paintings, of which there is one on show here, doubtless a self-portrait of a particularly blunt doggy-style encounter, rather incorrectly named “Scène érotique”. Though their relationship faltered, they are buried together in the Saint-Ouen cemetery outside Paris.

“She did want a different kind of life than the one she was born to,” concedes Parisi, who chose the title A World of Her Own for the exhibition. “She was really daring for a woman of her time, a real adventuress.”

Elaborating the story through the art itself, Parisi opens the show with Valadon’s first major painting, made in 1909. A remarkable portrayal of herself and Utter as Adam and Eve, it is most likely the first male nude painted by a western woman. (A fancy garland of fig leaves had to be added when it was shown in the Salon des Indépendants 11 years later.) Next to it is “The Fortune Teller”, an unnerving symbolist scene, in which a lounging Olympia is being read her cards. The future could be bleak.

The strong line that Valadon developed in her early days of drawing, then engraving, often follows through to her paintings: everything from figures to flowers are at times circumscribed with a heavy black line. In “The Blue Room”, from 1923, one of her very best works, the line traces the body of a large woman lying on a couch, a truculent expression in her eyes, a cigarette in her lips. In her pink camisole and stripy pyjama pants, she is categorically modern; this is a face that will never be troubled by anything as submissive as a simper.

That Valadon needs reintroduction as an artist is not just a matter of misogyny, or class, though both have certainly played their part in the obscurity that has enveloped her reputation since her death. She was a realist painter, a figurative painter, and though touched by Fauvism, impression, symbolism and even classicism, she deliberately chose not subscribe to any school. (Berthe Morisot, upper class and a rare female member of the Impressionists, has been far more easily absorbed into the story of art.) Meanwhile, tastes were changing as she neared her death. From early in the 20th century, Cubists, Constructivists and Surrealists were changing the artistic landscape and Valadon’s style was going out of fashion. 

Now, though, it seems that Valadon’s skill and confidence as an artist have prevailed. She has a sense of volume that shows a unique understanding of the body in space that she may have learnt first as a sitter, then as a painter: less an autodidact than someone whose education was entirely experiential. Her pictures have a sculptural force and an unflinching presence that has not gone away.

In 1930, the French art critic René Barotte said: “I do not know what will last of the visual art of our era, but Valadon’s work, elaborated in solitude, will remain outside time, like something at once sensitive, pure and strong.” Nearly 100 years later, this exhibition proves him right.

At Centre Pompidou-Metz until September 11, then Musée d’arts de Nantes, October 27-February 11 2024. centrepompidou-metz.fr