Maurice Utrillo
Rue
du Mont-Cenis
1914
oil on cardboard
72 x 100 cm
Louvre, Paris
Much
has been written about Maurice Utrillo, though as with Vincent van Gogh, the
facts of his life have become difficult to distinguish from the myths that have
sprung up around them. As such, it is not my intention to revisit this life,
and for another reason also: knowledge of Utrillo’s life fails to account for
what it is that makes his paintings what they are.
It
is certainly a mistake to try to position Utrillo as social commentator, a
responsibility bestowed retrospectively upon L. S. Lowry, to point out, for
those requiring it, that it was indeed grim up north, or for John Bratby, for
declaring that it could be grim down south too. The poorer areas of Paris in
the first decades of the twentieth century were certainly places of inequality,
sparseness and transition, captured memorably by Eugène Atget’s camera. Yet
Utrillo’s paintings stand as testaments to something else.
I’ve
chosen the French painter of Montmartre for the simple reason that I consider
him to have been, between about 1909 and 1914, years referred to later as his
manière blanche (white period), the most outstanding exponent of a rarefied
form of landscape painting, examples of which can be found in the oeuvres of
few artists before or since.
This
form of painting, if it can be deemed such, has no name. Nor does it possess
distinctive and unifying motifs or subject matter with which to comfortably
separate it from approaches pursued by other painters within the landscape
genre. For this and other reasons, the paintings of Utrillo are unique,
standing as a body of works wherein no single painting exceeds another, risks
the integrity of the grouping, or threatens the constitution of his world.
This
is not to suggest that there is incompleteness in respect of individual
paintings, merely that almost all of Utrillo’s works from this period are
indicative of similar concerns, attesting to shared truths and demarcating
interrelated ground. It is difficult to pick out a highlight from what amounts
to many dozen canvases and boards, in so far as each instance of painting
offers more of the same.
This
sameness, however, is richly variegated, and of such distinction, subtlety and grace
that his contemporaries, including many of the great moderns, admired its
quality whilst being at a loss to fully explain it. For a period of less than
six years Utrillo attained a remarkable level of consistency – more consistent
in fact than during the latter part of his protected (by his mother, Suzanne
Valadon, then wife, Lucie Valore) and protracted period of artistic decline,
from the 1920s until his death at the age of 71 in 1955.
Utrillo’s
gift comprised a fragile balance of interrelated elements, kept tightly in
check. The relationship of drawing to painting is central in understanding his
achievement. When later this bond began to weaken, and eventually dissolved,
its significance became much clearer. The structure is always purposeful, serving
to establish complex spatial relationships, redirecting the eye between and
beyond buildings, preventing the viewer from getting close enough to anything
to dispel the sense of longing. The shuttered windows face outwards.
Yet
it is Utrillo’s sensitivity to the subtlest gradations of tone (the seeing of
tonal variation in colour) alongside an ability to process, replicate and
distil the physicality of these sensations through a virtuoso handling of oil
paint that lifts these works above all comparable examples of urban landscape
painting. Never in painting has a sense of aloneness, of simple goings-on, of
leaden skies and light falling on cracking, peeling, piss-stained walls been so
beautiful.
Tom Palin, December 2015
Tom Palin, December 2015
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