Maurice Utrillo

Montmartre (Place Saint-Pierre), Paris Capitale, Maurice Utrillo

1955

Maurice Utrillo, initially Maurice Valadon, was born in Paris, December 26, 1883, the illegitimate son of the artist Suzanne Valadon. She, 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, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de 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 Edgar Degas, he became her mentor. Eventually she became a peer of the artists she had posed for. Meanwhile, Valedon's mother was left in charge of raising the young Utrillo, 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. Under her tutelage, he began painting the streets of his childhood neighborhood, Montmartre. Working in the tradition of the conventional veduta, he depicted streets, buildings, fountains, and avenues, which he captured at different seasons of the year in a style influenced by the lyrical realism of Camille Pissarro and Albert Sisley. However, by deploying a subtle palette - mainly yellows, turquoise, maroon and zinc white - he suffused the scenes with atmospheric* qualities that evoke feelings either of familiarity or of alienation in the viewer. Known as his 'White Period' (période blanche), the years between 1909 and 1914 represent the acme of Utrillo's creativity. During this time, he reduced his palette to white, shading into grays. He also mixed his paints with sand, plaster, and lime to render the physical substance of his subject matter, walls in particular. In 1910, art critics F. Jourdan and E. Faure discovered the artist. Their appreciation of his talent enabled Utrillo to take part for the first time in the 1912 Salon d'Automne*. Until 1914, Utrillo traveled in Brittany and Corsica; his works assumed an increasingly luminous* quality, which greatly enriched his earlier ascetic conception of reality. In 1924, he exhibited with his mother at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris and was offered a contract for a year. However, that same year he also attempted to commit suicide, which was probably the result of years of alcohol abuse. A powerful natural talent, Utrillo made an enormous contribution in consolidating painterly structure and texture. He was also important as a draughtsman*. In 1926, he designed stage scenery and costumes for Djaghilev's Ballets Russes. He received public recognition in 1928, when he was made a member of the Legion of Honour. Starting where Impressionism* left off, Utrillo became the best-known portrayer of Paris, especially Montmartre, painting both from nature and from postcards. His poetic interpretations of the streets and squares of Montmartre contributed substantially to popularizing a romantic image of that quarter. However, when he painted people, they were always represented as solitary beings, lost in social isolation.