UTRILLO, MAURICE

born Dec. 25, 1883, Paris, Fr. died Nov. 5, 1955, Le Vsinet French painter, noted especially for his pictures of the houses and streets of the Montmartre district of Paris. Utrillo was the illegitimate son of the model and artist Suzanne Valadon (18651938). His father was not known, and he was given a name by a Spanish art critic, Miguel Utrillo. The young Utrillo had no instruction as an artist apart from that given by his mother, who herself was untutored. When, as an adolescent, he became an alcoholic, his mother encouraged him to take up painting as therapy. Despite his frequent relapses into alcoholism, painting became Utrillo's obsession, and he produced thousands of oils, as well as a few drawings and lithographs. In 1924, to keep her son permanently away from the bars of Montmartre, Valadon moved with him to a chteau near Lyon. In 1935 the artist married a widow, Lucie Pauwels (Lucie Valore), herself a Sunday painter, and they settled in Le Vsinet, a fashionable suburb of Paris. Although Utrillo was initially attracted by the Impressionist paintings of Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, he had neither aesthetic concepts nor artistic preferences, wishing only to reproduce what he saw, as faithfully as possible. Shy and withdrawn, he painted very few portraits. Except for a number of flower pieces, the bulk of his compositions were devoted to the old, deteriorating houses and streets of Montmartre, its windmills (no longer existing), and its cafs and amusement places. Trips to Brittany and Corsica also yielded a few paintings. His best work is that of his white period (c. 190814), so called from the lavish use of zinc white. In heavy, rich pigment he built up aging, cracked walls, often covered with large inscriptions. These freshly conceived and freely brushed oils brought him fame and a great fortune. In 1929 he was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In his later years, his painting, largely based upon picture postcards, declined sharply in originality and vigour. First-rate Utrillos are few, but critics have linked him, as a landscapist, with such 18th- and 19th-century masters as Francesco Guardi, Hubert Robert, and Camille Corot. Unfortunately, countless crude forgeries have interfered with his good reputation.