About this work
*The Launch of the Net* is an oil on canvas painted by Suzanne Valadon in 1914. What confronts the viewer is monumental in every sense: at 201 cm high and 301 cm wide , the canvas gives over its entire surface to the male nude in motion. The naked body — gazed upon and desired — is a masculine one, studied across three different poses, each sequence charting a single continuous gesture that conveys the youth and power of the figure through the weight of the net.
The emphasis on athletic beauty heightens the composition's erotic charge, while its classicising simplicity pushes aside narrative detail and foregrounds Valadon's characteristic heavy contour lines and warm, sensuous colour. The palette is earthy and sun-baked — ochres, raw umbers, warm flesh tones — anchored by the rocky ground and the sweep of netting that binds the three figures into one arcing movement.
Valadon, who had learned her craft by watching the painters for whom she posed, reversed the dynamic entirely here, making the painter André Utter — her young lover — the model for *Le Lancement du filet*.
The monumental canvas was shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1914, where it irritated avant-garde critics. The provocation was not incidental: Valadon was the first woman to paint a large-format male nude face-on.
*The Launch of the Net* also marks the end of her sustained engagement with the male nude; after this, she turned primarily to an iconography centred on the female and child nude. That makes this work a genuine hinge point — the culmination of one line of inquiry before another opens.
On the wall, this painting commands rather than decorates. Its scale and physicality suit a large room with generous wall space and strong, even light — a wide hallway, a double-height living area, a studio. It speaks to viewers drawn to painting that carries a physical intelligence: work where the body is a subject, not a backdrop. The mood is neither serene nor confrontational — it holds the focused intensity of someone watching a person move when they don't know they're being watched. That gaze, reversed and reclaimed, is the painting's quiet revolution.
