Maurice Utrillo is revealed

Utrillo is revealed in full. He who never lies in his painting, would he be lying here? He would then have found something else. But no. Without need of any kind, without pride, without ambition, it is enough for him, like children, of an object, "even the most trivial in appearance", to be moved and to remember. Let us admire such a rare modesty. "This painter who comes from nowhere", as Salmon wrote, is content with his fervor alone. He does as he pleases: he does not depend on any principle or theory. Take it as it is, with its ups, downs, quirks, quirks, or leave it alone. When he filled his streets with women with big behinds, we thought he wanted to laugh. We laughed. We talked about Van Gogh, the mad painter. We tried to make a connection. What's the point ? Utrillo, in painting these galliards with enormous buttocks, yielded only to his loves alone.

Perhaps he remembered the worker whose accommodation he had shared! Perhaps, those street girls whom he pursued in his intoxication like figures of nightmare and who, luring him into a bar, delivered him bewildered to the vengeance of the pimps! Why not ? They are a formal testimony in the painter's work. Presences accomplices of the night and the torment that Utrillo endured, it is not by chance that they have this equivocal character that we remember. Let's not insist.

Utrillo who sees them s he has known them, situates them in the framework in which they live and, by a very curious scruple of accuracy, never forgets them. These robust creatures, sometimes dressed in long black veils, sometimes strapped in a rough apron, are the only ones he cherishes. He loves their hair like those prostitutes who earned him so many adventures in his early days, blows, humiliations.

If he suffered through them, he does not deny the obscure power they have kept over him. On the contrary. He constantly admits it, and whether we don't care or not, persists in showing them where he knows they are to be found: in the taverns, on the sidewalk or in front of those hotel entrances whose facades are shines like a withered smile. Accept them once and for all. It is too late for Utrillo to consider replacing them, for ever since his charming Rue de l'Abreuvoir at the Mirbeau sale fetched a decent price, amateurs and dealers have all bowed to what they call his fantasy so as not to not give it another name.



A beautiful painting being nature reflected by an artist, notes Baudelaire in his Salon of 1846, the best criticism is that which this painting will have, reflected by an intelligent and sensitive mind. What would the ever perceptive Baudelaire have thought of Utrillo? I am inclined to believe that after Puget, melancholic emperor of the convicts, he would have devoted to him, using the same mode of incantation, a stanza from The Lighthouses because, after all, if there is a painter whom Baudelaire had to understand because of his refusal to compromise or rehash school is unquestionably Utrillo.

The affinities that the poet of Les Fleurs du Mal discovered with Edgar Poe play out here in the same way with the painter, and not because he got as frightfully drunk as the author of Ulalume, but because their alcoholism at both determine a trance that Baudelaire sought for his part in opium.

Don't blame me, as they say, "for getting over it." But by grabbing his brushes, the day after an attack of which he was the victim more than once, Utrillo transposed his avatars of the night onto a level of fascination mixed with bitterness. Wherever it was and from the cops as well as from the thugs he had the gift of exasperating, the drunkard alone could count the brutalities whose delights he had to taste. We are far from the idyllic encounters of the Butte where, in the hay that was then withered on the site of the square Saint-Pierre, Bruant made one of his characters say:

This is where I met Nini,
Nini who wanted to make her nest,
In Montmer-er-tre.

Marlous and gigolettes, reports Pierre Mac Orlan, met in the evening after dinner, among the millstones. "There were families sitting in the grass. Voices called out to each other: "Marie, will you stay close to me!" a firework, the voices quieted down. Then in all directions, scattered in the warm grass like red glowworms, the cigarette fires lit up. Sometimes an accordion played a tune from the street.

But this Montmartre which almost seems to date from the time of Gérard de Nerval, Utrillo has brought it back to life by emphasizing, at pleasure, its peaceful and village character. Here again, however, the heavy, aching silence, the cause of which I have just attempted to interpret, extends through narrow alleys bordered by old gardens and through rustic squares whose houses seem uninhabited.

Maurice knew the legendary Bousca well, however, who ran a hotel at the corner of rue Norvins and rue de Mont-Cenis, but Bousca had kicked him out to avoid any discussion. As for Lemoine, always more than indulgent to the whims of artists, he had one day found that those of Utrillo went beyond the limits allowed by his honorable clientele. Obviously in the admirable canvas of La Place du Tertre, the drunkard did not want to show his resentment against these two characters who, like Father Spielman, moreover, forcefully drove him out of their home as soon as the painter showed a sneaky intention to intrude.

It is no less true that having been snubbed many times by these Gentlemen, Maurice did not carry them in his heart. He doomed them rather to the worst calamities, but as it is often in this trait that Utrillo's genius asserts itself, we have no more than them after all to take offense. It is necessary to take into account another more complex and noble feeling of which the painter was perhaps not always aware but of which he suffered, in his filial love, the daily disillusion. Without encroaching on the private domain, let us however say here that it is possible that the presence of Utter in the existence of Valadon had the consequence of adding to the pain of Utrillo one more occasion to appear because - of some name he is called this "pain" is the basis of his genius.

We laugh today at certain repressions. The "young" especially don't pay attention to it since they appeal less to their own experience of life than to their conception of it. But for the men of my generation, these repressions are not negligible if we admit that a work of art is, most of the time, the representation that its author has of the world through his modest or conquering personality. At Utrillo the fact is not discussed. If these canvases of the "white manner" show, not without violently suffering from it, the imbalance in which he lived, other canvases that he painted subsequently reveal it in an unexpected light. Exhausted, depressed by the excesses he was indulging in, he longed in his distress only to behave differently.