The 1930s Lesbian Heartthrob Who Became the Face of Art Deco

Before Marilyn Monroe ever wriggled into a white dress or Pamela Anderson slow-mo ran down a beach, there was another blonde bombshell selling sex all over Europe. Her name was Suzy Solidor: the most painted woman in the world. 

Like these descendants who came after her, she, too, was an entertainer, making her fortune on the Paris bar scene. Except, this one? She was for the girls. Suzy made no effort to hide the fact that she was a lesbian. A major recording artist in France throughout the 1930s, her songs were sensual, raspy-voiced confessions that titillated audiences with tales of lesbian love-making. Just take the song “Ouvre” (“Open”, in English) where Suzy croons into an imagined girlfriend’s ear: “open your two trembling knees, open your thighs.” 

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Solidor herself was the product of a sex scandal. Her mother was the cleaning woman for a wealthy lawyer in Brittany and, when Suzy came into the world in 1900, her father refused to acknowledge her. No matter – where this Breton girl was going, she had no need for daddy’s money.  

She eventually made her way to Paris on the dime of a wealthy sugar maman called Yvonne de Bremond d’Ar. “She sculpted me,” Suzy would later say. It was Yvonne who paid for Suzy’s first music lessons, elocution classes, and even commissioned her very first portraits. Suzy would later say, “She had me pose, almost always nude, for a quantity of artists such as Domergue, Van Dongen, Marie Laurencin, Vertès, Foujita, Kisling . . . not to mention even better ones.”

One of these “lesser” painters was a lesbian herself. French artist Marie Laurencin was a known sapphist, and yet her relationship with Suzy was far from the torrid affair you might expect. It was ultimately class that divided them. For, Marie rolled with the daughters of aristocrats, artists, literary taste-makers like Natalie Clifford Barney, Gertrude Stein, and Romaine Brooks. In the eyes of thus lesbian intelligentsia, Suzy was nothing more than a street rat who happened struck lucky. 

It was once said that Marie had the power to tame her sitters. If you stepped into her studio a wild child, you walked out “a very good little girl.” But Suzy was forever feral, a true product of the working-class.  

By 1932, she had struck out on her own and was the proprietor of her very own nightclub, La Vie Parisienne. It was here where she launched her music career, performing every night in front of a portrait wall showing herself in various artistic styles, always with her signature blond bob. 

It was a publicity stunt and, like a 20th-century Trisha Paytas, her brand became one of tongue-in-cheek self-obsession. Dressed in silky gowns, her bob rocking, audiences flocked from all over to see Suzy’s siren songs. Edith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich both performed on her stage and gossip rags couldn’t get enough of her. When she produced an album called Paris-Lesbien, the writer Jean Cocteau commented that Suzy’s signature gravelly voice was one that clearly “issue[d] from her sex.” 

She even made bit cameos in movies, like in 1936’s La Garçonne, where she played an eerily true-to-life nightclub owner who initiates a young flapper into the seedy underworld of sapphism. 

But an actress she was not. It was Suzy’s ability to self-mythologise that skyrocketed her to fame, and even earned her the nickname “the most painted woman in the world.” 

From Francis Bacon to Man Ray to Picasso, Suzy commissioned 33 portraits over the years and gained a reputation for being the quintessential Parisian muse. But her most unforgettable collaboration was undoubtedly her team up with Tamara de Lempicka, the bisexual pioneer of the Art Deco movement. 

Tamara agreed to paint her, but only if Suzy would pose nude. “I thought you’d never ask,” canvas-Suzy seems to say, a smirk slightly visible on her babydoll-red lips. Suzy stretches out across a cubist skyline. Blue satin slips from her shoulders, revealing a single conical, stylised breast. It’s cheeky, it’s revealing, it’s Solidor at her most iconic. 

Tamara and Suzy, of course, became lovers. Tamara was the pursuer, Suzy the pursued. The Polish painter was besotted, but Suzy had bigger fish to fry. Tamara would later credit her portrait of the club owner with taking her career to the next level. 

“She had a very good figure,” Tamara said. “When she came to my studio, and while she was sitting for the portrait, she brought the newspaper. And that was the first newspaper that started [to publish] photographs of myself and my studio. Because of her name: ‘That’s Suzy Solidar sitting for Tamara de Lempicka.’ It was wonderful publicity for me… But she did it.”

No one could have expected that it would be Suzy, who once had the French press at her beck and call, who would slip from the historical record. But, then again, no one would have expected Hitler’s troops rolling into Paris, either. 

Suzy’s club remained open throughout the Nazi invasion, despite its reputation for catering to homosexuals. In fact, La Vie Parisienne didn’t just survive, but thrived, becoming popular with German soldiers. In order to keep her liquor license, Suzy was forced to sign a form self-identifying as a member of the Aryan race. It was an ethically dubious move, but Suzy was working under what she called “Solidorian principles”; a.k.a., eat or be eaten. 

Jessica Walker, the performer behind a tribute show called “Solidor, All I Want Is One Night,” argues that hidden records “suggest that she helped Jewish people get out, she got hold of papers for them. I think she was a double agent actually: from my research I reckon she was passing information to the Resistance, from the Germans when they were drunk in her club.”

Regardless, once the Nazis were defeated, life as Suzy knew it was over. She was branded a traitor after the war and forced into exile for five years. Taking only her most beloved portraits with her, she traveled around the U.S. before settling in the south of France. 

She eventually opened a small cabaret bar in her basement. But the fame of those interwar years? Long-gone. Suzy’s last stage act was that of “The Admiral,” a masculine drag persona whose two great loves were the sea and loose-moraled women. The Admiral moved with purpose, cloaked in all the symbols of naval rank. Beaten down, some might argue that the character of The Admiral was Suzy’s way of saying, look, I really used to be somebody. She certainly clung to her portraits the way a grizzled veteran might cling to his regimental badges. 

But in 1983, Suzy and her personas took one final bow, with the grand muse passing away peacefully in Cagnes-sur-Mere. From the French coast she came and to the coast she returned. A collection of her legendary portraits are permanently on display at the Château-Musée Grimaldi Museum.

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