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Maurice Utrillo French Painter French (Paris, 1883 - 1955, Le Vésinet) View objects by this artist.

(Source:  "Utrillo, Maurice," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. © 1993-1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.)

French painter, born in Paris, son of the painter Suzanne Valadon, who was his only art teacher. Utrillo's earliest work (1904-1908), painted under the influence of the impressionists, is prevailingly delicate in color and consists of townscapes in suburbs north of Paris. From 1909 to 1914 Utrillo painted with a greatly limited palette dominated by shades of white. This period was known as his White Period; it marks both the development of Utrillo's personal style and the years of his greatest experimentation. In some of the paintings the colors are applied with a palette knife rather than a brush, to simulate the texture of the walls of plastered buildings; in others, the influence of cubism is clearly discernible.

Utrillo's numerous canvases of empty Parisian streets, village scenes, and cathedrals, usually invested with somber pathos or grandeur, won him a worldwide reputation. Characteristic of these paintings is Rue Saint-Vincent (1913, Art Institute of Chicago).
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Source: Alfred Warner (1953) http://www.rosings.com/cover.html)

Utrillo was the only child of Marie-Clémentine " Suzanne" Valadon.  A highly neurotic youngster, Maurice was a poor student in secondary school. He was a failure, to say the least, as a bank clerk, and by the time he was eighteen had become an alcoholic and had to be temporarily committed to an asylum. It was "occupational therapy" which saved him and his hidden genius. Upon a physician's advice, Suzanne urged Maurice to take up painting as an emotional outlet through which he might regain his equilibrium. This experiment worked so well Maurice Utrillo produced thousands of oils, gouaches, watercolors, and pencil sketches, relying chiefly on his memory or the picture postcards in his possession. By 1920, he had become a legendary figure, internationally known. In 1929, the French Republic awarded him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. In his fifties he married Lucie Pauwels, who managed his interests so ably that they could purchase a luxurious villa in the neighborhood of Paris. Utrillo retired to Le Vesinet in the late thirties.
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(http://www.biography.com/articles/Utrillo-9514159?print   6-24-09)
(born December 26, 1883, Paris, France—died November 5, 1955, Le Vésinet) French painter who was noted for his depictions of the houses and streets of the Montmartre district of Paris.

Born out of wedlock, Utrillo was the son of the model and artist Suzanne Valadon. His father was not known, and he was given his name by a Spanish art critic, Miguel Utrillo. He 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.Shy and withdrawn, Utrillo painted very few portraits. He usually portrayed—often using picture postcards as sources—the deteriorating houses and streets of Montmartre, its old windmills, and its cafés and places of amusement. He was also inspired by trips to Brittany and Corsica.Utrillo's most highly regarded work is that of his “white period” ( 1909–14), so called because of his lavish use of zinc white, which he sometimes mixed with plaster. In heavy, rich pigment, he depicted aging, cracked walls, sometimes covered in inscriptions. These works brought him fame and financial success. In 1924, to keep her son permanently away from the bars of Montmartre, Valadon moved with him to a château near Lyon, France.Utrillo was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1928. In 1935 he married Lucie Pauwels, a widow who was herself an amateur painter, and they settled in Le Vésinet, a fashionable suburb of Paris. In his later years, his painting declined sharply in originality and vigour. Utrillo was notably prolific; he produced thousands of oil paintings. First-rate paintings by Utrillo 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.
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