Everyone had Utrillos

Utrillo arrived at Quai aux Fleurs in a state of inebriation which upset the entire building, for he fell down the stairs five or six times, without destroying, by some miracle, the admirable little view of the Mill which, painted by same morning he carried carefully by a corner. There was nothing excessive about this opinion at the time, at least on this side of the water, for in Montmartre people did not hesitate to openly call the knickknack an imbecile who, discovering a box of Utrillo, decided to buy it.

The brocos de la Butte have always thought they were very clever and when they had "bazarded" a painting by this painter, made hot throats of it, then automatically replaced it with another which they kept in reserve in their back room. In those days, everyone had Utrillos: janitors, gardeners, "gniafs", police officers, without forgetting the innkeepers in whose houses it was, often, by the dozens that you could count them on the walls.

Marie Vizier had a very fine collection of them from "the white period", which she did not appreciate - I am afraid - at its price. They occupied three entire panels of the dining room, nailed to the wall or surrounded by an old black and gilt wooden stick which did not highlight them precisely.
If it is true, as it is claimed, that "the frame is the pimp of painting", those of La Belle Gabrielle were hardly "demi-salts" or perhaps even less. But who would have afforded the luxury of an old frame for a canvas by Utrillo? It would have cost more than this canvas and demoralized - if I may say so - the market. Indeed, in Montmartre where legend has it that bistros are artists in their time, one can wonder when this hour strikes, because I have never seen any of these brave shopkeepers give the sketches of painters the slightest interest. They stuck it all up on you good or bad and, without understanding anything about it, calmly waited for the moment to part with it.
Is not it ? they told you bluntly. Just let it come.
For Utrillo it was - whatever people say - playing on velvet, because of the tiny sum paid for his paintings, the character they presented and the reputation that gradually attached to the name. of the artist. And yet, what help Utrillo would have found with these gentlemen if he had had to rely on them! They would all have slipped away. In 1918, Delloue, of which Utrillo was the tenant, was bleeding himself - he said - in the four veins to pay the painter's pension, in Aulnay-sous-Bois, in a nursing home. The poor man ! According to him, Utrillo was ruining him, and when at the end of the war he terminated his contract, it took a coincidence for Zborowski, who supported Modigliani, to take on Monsieur Maurice and painfully pay him a few hundred per month.

It was really a small thing, but at the time no one trusted Utrillo. In vain I introduced him to a very rich friend who, like everyone else, was looking for a painter to support, the friend did not make up his mind and preferred to lend his encouragement to a robber without a future whom he found on the Butte in the process of to smear the inside of a cafe. It really seemed that Utrillo had not yet disarmed fate. Baroque as it was, one saw in him only the bohemian and not the admirable and prodigious artist whose new manner blossomed with radiant intensity.

Is it weird? In front of its Parisian landscapes, its churches, its barracks, its hospitals whose high walls no longer have the uniformity or the tragedy of yesteryear, but a surprising balance and a striking neatness of craftsmanship and expression, in front of its streets of the suburbs with their neat villas, their trees lustrous behind railings, their skies, their perspectives, the amateurs, surprised, rebelled. They found this way too dry, too cold, preferred - and much - the previous one, without wanting to stop at what this one offered of magic and exceptional. Yet it was the same streets, the same churches.

It was, past the gates of Paris, the same little squares whose bistros with brown-red fronts invite you to enter, the same groves with green trellises. We didn't care. We did not yet understand that in this decor so raw in tone, so marvelously described and colored, the tragedy of today affirmed itself as it is. After Dostoyevsky, one could not accept the adventure of the modern bandits whose gray or yellow car had come out of the first street on the right to line up along this banal facade in front of the entrance of a bank or an establishment credit. No. What a story ! All you could see was this recently remodeled façade, these smooth walls topped with tiles, these cement sidewalks, these well-aligned shops whose presence harbors no mystery.

Where was Utrillo? We looked for him, we questioned his canvases as if they had to answer and, when they answered or let appear, to certain connoisseurs, the personality of the painter, they did not take it into account and went away disoriented.

This is the impression they had at first without precisely discovering that what makes the attraction and the flavor of this new way consists in its very apparent coldness, its correction, its application. Why not agree? Utrillo's lack of imagination is shown here in the meticulous notation of the subject, his tracing one might say, until, from this sterile copy, the spark suddenly springs.

Since then, who has not tasted, in these compositions Were we deliberately stripped of eloquence, the sneaky feeling of unease to which they hold the secret? Who defended it? Who has not found in him this subtle bitterness, Like an air impregnated with salt, this equivocal and dull anxiety? You have to be up to date.

After Montmartre, whose leprous hovels disappeared under the peak of the demolishers, after the zone and its hovels, there emerged in the work of Utrillo the formal testimony of its evolution.

It is he always, he alone, subject to temptation. He who was fired and beaten, who was taken to the station. In vain he painted, as before, from documents, he saw clearly during his fugues that something had changed. Through the dark streets, where the bistros keep their fires lit, like beacons, where the houses develop their restored facades on the closed floors, where, from whichever side you look, you can see perspectives drawn with a chalk line, a new element entered in play. It borrowed from the physiognomy of post-war Paris its aspect as if petrified under the light of electricity.

Instead of these shadowy corners, these vague holes peopled with phantoms, a harsh architecture established its planes, its lines, its immeasurable volumes. It emerged from beyond to make contact with the ground, to rest its mediocre and hollow mass there, resonant like concrete. Nothing of that exterior disorder of yesteryear, of those smoky and sinister hovels. In the bars, with the luminous ceilings, in the shops without style or charm, in the hotels with running water, Utrillo was no longer at home.

He discovered a strange world, tall buildings whose cut of new bricks seemed to bleed, small stunted trees in their cast iron stakes, huge billboards, giant lampposts, and a facade with another of the taut networks of telephone wires. Was he going to close his eyes to such transformations? What not!