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Lot Essay
The Association Utrillo has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
"Maurice Utrillo is the painter of Montmartre. Since Lupine, I believe no other artist has been able to render with such acute sensitivity the charm of this little provincial town, isolated on the summit of Paris. Utrillo excels in painting the cracked walls of the old houses. The smallest miserable front takes on in his paintings an extraordinary intensity of color and life" (L. Libaude, Maurice Utrillo, exh. cat., Galerie Eugène Blot, Paris, 1913).
From a young age, Utrillo began depicting urban landscapes with originality and a recognizable style of quiet simplification. He dedicated his long, troubled life to painting his beloved neighborhood of Montmartre, the winding, narrow streets which had become the principle artistic center of Paris by the early 1900s. While Utrillo rarely presented important monuments and structures as the main focus in his paintings, he painted the streets of Montmartre many times throughout his career from various view points and in great detail. Rue du Chevalier de la Barre, Les coupoles du Sacré-Cœur et le clocher de Saint-Pierre de Montmartre is an example in which the Sacré-Coeur is given prime placement in the central background—the bright white edifice stands proudly at the top of the street with colorful pedestrians walking to and fro.
Although his life was plagued by alcoholism and self-destruction, Utrillo's artistic genius was unwavering with a remarkable gift for composition and unerring sense of color relation. His fellow artists enviously lamented Utrillo's expertise at special effects—he knew how to bring together art and science in order to obtain rare contrasts of color with changing effects of light. The present work embodies these qualities and those of his "colorist period" later in life, in which he masterfully applied color with thick impasto to create undulating light and shadows in the buildings and pavement.
(fig. 1) The artist in his studio.
"Maurice Utrillo is the painter of Montmartre. Since Lupine, I believe no other artist has been able to render with such acute sensitivity the charm of this little provincial town, isolated on the summit of Paris. Utrillo excels in painting the cracked walls of the old houses. The smallest miserable front takes on in his paintings an extraordinary intensity of color and life" (L. Libaude, Maurice Utrillo, exh. cat., Galerie Eugène Blot, Paris, 1913).
From a young age, Utrillo began depicting urban landscapes with originality and a recognizable style of quiet simplification. He dedicated his long, troubled life to painting his beloved neighborhood of Montmartre, the winding, narrow streets which had become the principle artistic center of Paris by the early 1900s. While Utrillo rarely presented important monuments and structures as the main focus in his paintings, he painted the streets of Montmartre many times throughout his career from various view points and in great detail. Rue du Chevalier de la Barre, Les coupoles du Sacré-Cœur et le clocher de Saint-Pierre de Montmartre is an example in which the Sacré-Coeur is given prime placement in the central background—the bright white edifice stands proudly at the top of the street with colorful pedestrians walking to and fro.
Although his life was plagued by alcoholism and self-destruction, Utrillo's artistic genius was unwavering with a remarkable gift for composition and unerring sense of color relation. His fellow artists enviously lamented Utrillo's expertise at special effects—he knew how to bring together art and science in order to obtain rare contrasts of color with changing effects of light. The present work embodies these qualities and those of his "colorist period" later in life, in which he masterfully applied color with thick impasto to create undulating light and shadows in the buildings and pavement.
(fig. 1) The artist in his studio.