Maurice Utrillo, December 26, 1883 – November 5, 1955 – The Magic of Montmartre

            “Utrillo is a poet, the lovely, isolated poet of a reality that is sometimes trivial in the extreme, sometime majestic […] Utrillo has no need of any special figurative setting: walls, grills, trees, lamp-posts, cobblestones, rows of houses, cathedral towers, pavement, fences, chimneys and dark windows all take their place with their own peculiar expressiveness […] They suggest the passage of time, the waning of live, the desperate melancholy of certain times and seasons”. (Carlo Santini 1972)

            Montmartre has been abandoned to live off its past. If the legend of Montmartre can be said to have begun in 1865 with Manet and the artists of Café Guerbois, it ends in 1935 when Utrillo left town. The shacks were replaced by apartments. The artists fled and were replaced by tourists, yet, in spite of it all, it retains its distinctive character. The old buildings, the coffee shops, the bar-restaurants, the street vendors, and multiracial painters, who may create the next masterpiece for ten Euros, have retained the spirit of the area through modern times.

            Montmartre was considered the hub of the artists, split between the struggling artists and the unsuccessful ones: Suzanne Valadon, Modigliani, Dufy, Picasso, Pascin, Vlaminck, Braque, van Dongen, and Derain. They lived to paint, write, drink and spend the nights in the cabarets artistiques and dream of success.

            Utrillo was the son of the artist Suzanne Valadon (born Marie-Clémentine Valadon), an eighteen-year-old artist's model. She never revealed who had been the father of her child; speculation exists that he was the offspring from a liaison with an equally young amateur painter named Boissy, or with the well established painter, Puvis de Chavannes, or even with Renoir. In 1891 a Spanish artist, Miguel Utrillo y Molins, signed a legal document acknowledging paternity, although the question remains as to whether he was in fact the child's father.

            An anecdote concerning Utrillo's paternity is related in the unpublished memoirs of one of his American collectors, Ruth Bakwin: "After Maurice was born to Suzanne Valadon, she went to Renoir, for whom she had modeled nine months previously. Renoir looked at the baby and said, 'He can't be mine, the color is terrible!' Next she went to Degas, for whom she had also modeled. He said, 'He can't be mine, the form is terrible!' At a cafe, Valadon saw an artist she knew named Miguel Utrillo, to whom she spilled her woes. The man told her to call the baby Utrillo: 'I would be glad to put my name to the work of either Renoir or Degas!'"

            Valadon, who had become a model after a fall from a trapeze ended her chosen career as a circus acrobat, found that posing for Berthe Morisot, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec and others provided her with an opportunity to study their techniques; in some cases, she had also become their mistress. She taught herself to paint, and when Toulouse-Lautrec introduced her to Degas, he became her mentor. Eventually she became a peer of the artists she had posed for.

            Meanwhile, her mother was left in charge of raising the young Maurice, who soon showed a troubling inclination toward truancy and alcoholism. When a mental illness took hold of the twenty-one year old Utrillo in 1904, he was encouraged to paint by his mother. He soon showed real artistic talent. With no training beyond what his mother taught him, he drew and painted what he saw in Montmartre. After 1910 his work attracted critical attention, and by 1920 he was internationally acclaimed. In 1928, the French government awarded him the Cross of the Légion d'honneur. Throughout his life, however, his mental disorder would result in his being interned in mental asylums repeatedly.

            In middle age Utrillo became fervently religious and in 1935, at the age of fifty-two, he married Lucie Valore and moved to Le Vesinet, just outside of Paris. By that time, he was too ill to work in the open air and painted landscapes viewed from windows, from post cards, and from memory.

            At seventy, Utrillo still remembered and painted the Bohemian and proletarian Paris which he had roamed as a frustrated, unhappy young ruffian. His life had no tragic ending à la Van Gogh or Modigliani. The story's end was peace -- the same peace that greets the beholder of Utrillo's transfigurations of even the most sordid places; the peace that as an old man he sought with the believing soul of a child.

            Although his life also was plagued by alcoholism, he lived into his seventies. Maurice Utrillo died on 5 November 1955, and was buried in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent in Montmartre.

            One may recognize the influence of Pissarro and Cézanne, but his solidity of composition, his gift for simplification, and his unerring sense of color relation are instinctive to him. Just as he is not a primitive, neither is he a classicist, a realist, an Impressionist, a Fauve, an Expressionist, nor even a romantic. He is a complete individualist who defies all classifications. It is customary to concentrate on the pictures of his "white period," when roughly between 1909 and 1914, white tints and shades were prominent in his work. However, the years preceding those of his "white period" yielded many fine paintings; and in the paintings of his later "colorist period" he often used bright and cheerful hues successfully.

            Above all, Utrillo had an eye for Montmartre -- the old, picturesque, and relatively quiet artists' quarter as it existed before the First World War. He was fascinated with the sad little streets and miserable bistros of the industrial suburbs. It is true that he also painted some of the great cathedrals of France and panoramas of Brittany and Corsica, as well as a few flower pieces, but it is as the painter of the unheralded sights of the French capital that he will be known forever.

            In the entire history of modern art, miracles have occurred only twice, and both times in France. Just Before 1900, a poor, middle-aged civil servant, Henri Rousseau, a self-taught "Sunday painter," infused new energies and ideas into art. Shortly thereafter, a young, half-mad alcoholic of Montmartre, Maurice Utrillo, presented strange landscapes which delighted the man in the street and astonished the connoisseur. These pictures inspired many artists to re-examine their world and, instead of turning to abstraction, once again to re-create reality. Yet, except for the miraculous element of self-preservation through art, no parallel exists between the two masters. Utrillo was the pupil of his outstanding mother, Suzanne Valadon, and a close friend of Amedeo Modigliani. Unlike Rousseau, Utrillo is not a primitive. He has been a professional painter all his life.

(Portions of these texts are taken from “Utrillo” at Rosings.com)