Maurice Utrillo 1883-1955

Maurice Utrillo 1883-1955

Le Remise de Voitures D’Enfants, Rue Lamarck a Monmartre, 1945
Oil on canvas, 18 x 21 ¾ inches (45.7 x 55.2 cm)
Signed lower right: Maurice Utrillo. V

Provenance:
Mlle M.-L Leleu, Le Havre
Doctor George Gering, California
Sandra Werther, New York
Private collection, California

Literature:
Paul Petrides, L’oeuvre complet de Maurice Utrillo,
Page 304, no. 2242, (illustrated)


Maurice Utrillo was born in Paris, on the 26th of December 1883 to the French painter Suzanne Valadon. His mother posed as a model for such painters as Renoir and Puvis de Chavannes before discovering her own talent for drawing and painting. His father, the Spanish painter Miguel Utrillo (1862-1934), only admitted paternity eight years after Maurice’s birth.

Utrillo had no predisposition for art, but when he was 19 his mother urged him to adopt drawing and painting as to distract him from his need for alcohol. In search of a suitable subject, he went to the countryside around Montmagny, a village to the north of Paris. There, between the autumn of 1903 and the winter of 1904, he completed almost 150 paintings—somber, heavily impasto landscapes as the Roofs of Montmagny (Paris, Pompidou). By 1906 the doctor felt that Utrillo could return to Montmatre. His pictures of the streets and suburbs were painted with a less heavy impasto and with lighter tones. He was attracted by ordinary houses, as seen in works such as Rue du Mont-Cenis and Berlioz’s House (both 1914, Paris Museum Orangerie), and suburban churches, as seen in Church of Villiers-le-Bel (1909, Private collection). These themes, associated with painters such as Daumier, Pissaro and Caillebotte, became Utrillo’s chief source of inspiration, but he soon turned to a more ambitious subject—cathedrals. He was concerned with the development of an ordered composition and a flattened treatment of space that suggested the artificial appearance of theatre, as seen in Notre-Dame (1909, Paris Museum Orangerie). During World War I he found that such subjects allowed him to project strong emotions, as seen in Rheims Cathedral in Flames (1914, Basle, Private Collection).

From 1909 until 1914 Utrillo mixed glue, plaster or cement with his paint to obtain the whites for which he became famous. His paintings of buildings show a striking contrast between the boldness of his color and his painstaking draughtsmanship (traces of his having used a ruler and compass are often noticeable). Carried to their logical conclusion, these experiments led him to produce austere monochrome paintings in beige and grey.
His deteriorating health and social awkwardness led him gradually to withdraw from the streets of Montmartre into the relative safety of nursing homes. Here he developed the habit of painting from postcards. His stepfather, the painter Andre Utter (1886-1948), and his mother selected cards that reproduced his favorite views of la Butte Montmarte. He worked from these in their communal studio at 12 Rue Cortot, in the restaurant La Belle Gabrielle or in a bedroom above the Pere Gay bistro. He exacted his revenge on the locals, who had made his life difficult with their criticisms and jokes, by depicting them in his paintings in rear view as heavily outlined clumsy shapes and stereotyped silhouettes.

There is no hint in Utrillo’s work of the vicissitudes of his life: spells in homes, a move with his mother and stepfather to the Chateau de Saint-Bernard in the Saone in 1923, his marriage to Lucie Pauwels (ne Valore) in 1936, their consequent establishment in an orderly bourgeois existence at Vesinet, and various visits to the country. His late paintings, such as Old House at Aubusson (gauche on paper, 1935, Lausanne Pal Rumine) and Village Street under Snow (1945, Albi Museum, Toulouse Lautrec) are characterized by rich colors and strong black contours and are based almost entirely on landscape themes. From 1937 on his friend and dealer Paul Petrides looked after him at the request of his family. In spite of his wretched life he maintained a prolific output with a deep vein of poetic melancholy. He died in May 1955. His critical reputation declined posthumously, although he remained popular with collectors and the public.

Bibliography:
A.Tabarant: “Maurice Utrillo” (Paris, 1927)
A. Werner: “Utrillo” (New York, 1955)
P.Petrides: L’oeuvre compete de Masurice Utrillo, 5 vols. (Paris, 1959-1974)
J. Warnod: “Maurice Utrillo” (Paris, 1983) Centenaries d’Utrillo (Exh, cat, ed, J, Warnod; Tokyo, Mitsukoshi, 1985)