MAURICE UTRILLO: THE PAINTER WHO DID NOT WANT TO BE ONE

Maurice Utrillo’s story is above all one dominated by women. His grandmother, with whom he grew up. His wife Lucie, after whom he named his last residence. And then there is a women who in many respects was perhaps the most important—but definitely one who made his career as an artist possible in the first place: Suzanne Valadon. The painter and muse was just eighteen when she gave birth to Maurice Utrillo. Who is biological father is remains a secret to this day. Utrillo’s collector Ruth Bakwin describes Valadon’s search for his possible genitor as follows: “After Maurice was born, Suzanne Valadon went to Renoir, for whom she had posed as a model nine months prior to that. Renoir looked at the baby and said: ‘He can’t be mine, the color is terrible!’ The next time she went to Degas, for whom she had also posed as a model. He said: ‘He can’t be mine, the form is terrible!’ The odyssey continued for a while, and the young Maurice was ultimately given the name of the Spanish art critic Miguel Utrillo, who was officially appointed his step-father but who apparently spent very little time with his ‘son.’”

The bond between Maurice and his mother never dissolved. On the contrary: the painter expressed his deep attachment to his mother with his signature “Maurice Utrillo V.,” which he applied to his paintings until the end, supplementing his own name with Valadon, which stood for his affinity with his mother. She was the one who at around the turn of the 20th century encouraged him to paint—as a kind of therapy to counter his own demons and alcohol, which the boy succumbed to as an adolescent. Prior to that, Maurice Utrillo, who grew up for the most part with his grandmother in a suburb of Paris, and then later with Suzanne Valadon, had not shown any interest at all in painting. However, soon after he would become one of the most active painters in Montmartre, and in 1924 he exhibited alongside his mother for the first time. Yet wine, reports an article from 1949 in the magazine Spiegel, would time and again stand in the way of his creative urge, so that his later wife, Lucie, had to lock the alcohol away in a cupboard.

Unlike many of his fellow artists, Maurice Utrillo never enjoyed classic training as a painter. Critics and collectors love the original, almost crude force with which he often stages street canyons and views of streets with only few but all the more virtuoso brushstrokes. Influenced by Impressionist painters and works of his time, Utrillo’s oeuvre nevertheless constitutes a distinct counterpoint: his paintings do not dissolve into landscapes of color but maintain a clear formal rigor. This fits in with the fact that the artist’s different creative phases are distinguished less by the question of the painting style and more by the use of color: while his first paintings are still markedly dismal, during journeys to Brittany Maurice Utrillo discovers light as a new element of style. In his “white phase” he blends his colors in the familiar generous way and uses a great deal of sand and plaster in order to lend the paintings an atmosphere suffused with light. With the progressive loss of his eyesight, the colors become radiant and bold.

The Betrayal

Besides his artistic talent, the fact that Utrillo was able to capture his quarter in such a masterly way, even as his vision continued to fail, possibly had other reasons: he was one of the few successful artists who was a child of Montmartre. Many of the great names also represented in the SCHIRN exhibition did not move to Paris until they were adults. In contrast, Maurice Utrillo already spent his early years between the street canyons, which he captures in geometrically structured pictures. The sleazy establishments, the “music halls” between upper-middle-class residential buildings and small wooden shacks, were his world. His creative urge was considered legendary: even when he was yet again picked up by a police patrol due to drunkenness, Utrillo is said to have reached for brush and paint and have stood at his easel at the police station. Which also led to Montmartre teeming with paintings with the coveted signature “Maurice Utrillo V.” in Montmartre in the forties. Together with painters such as Picasso, Utrillo’s pictures are copied in great number—often so skillfully that in view of his extensive oeuvre, the artist himself never knew exactly which painting actually stemmed from his own brush.

In this, one of the last stories in the life of Maurice Utrillo, for once it is not a woman who plays the main role: of all people, a good friend of his is said to have produced the forgeries. Only several years before his death, Utrillo sues the art critic Pinson-Berthet, who is arrested and taken to prison. Newspapers publish reports about it, and art dealers are officially warned of copies. However, the selling prices for his paintings will barely recover during Utrillo’s lifetime.