Maurice utrillo artist biography

This pushed his work into the forefront and provided him a platform to display his home grown creations. As fame and success became thrust upon the very withdrawn painter, his best works were being created. These paintings focused on the cityscapes of Paris. The use of aged white and plaster explicitly displayed the traditional Paris streets.

The paintings drawn were all true to the imperfections of buildings such as showcasing cracks and dilapidated homes that were left abandoned. Utrillo tended towards a neutral palette and avoided fine details with his brushwork, favouring an atmospheric portrayals of the streets that feel laden with endearing familiarity. Amongst his most favoured subjects was the Lapin Agile, a cabaret club that was frequented by the artistic and literary circles of the time.

However, by this point he was too ill to paint en plein air and would work from his window, from postcards, or from memory. Please contact the gallery for further information on this artist. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. French painter — This article is about the French painter of the School of Paris. For the Catalan art critic, scenographer, painter and engineer, see Miquel Utrillo.

Portrait of Maurice Utrillo , by Suzanne Valadon , his mother. Montmartre , Paris, France. Dax , Aquitaine, France. Biography [ edit ]. Paternity [ edit ]. Nazi-looted art [ edit ]. In popular culture [ edit ]. Selected works [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. Instead, it is likely that this composition was based on a picture of the square Utrillo saw on a postcard, although, admits the Tate "none has so far been traced that shows exactly the same view.

By , Utrillo's alcoholism had begun to take a serious toll on his health. Combined with serious depression, the ill effects forced him into a sanitorium frequently. When not hospitalized, he was often watched over by a family member either in his studio or in a hotel room. Either way, he was not capable of going out and drawing or painting. That began the practice of Utrillo working from postcards rather than on site.

His mother and stepfather, Valadon's second husband, would bring the artist postcards so that he could continue painting, which provided a welcome distraction from his agony. Indeed, a painting Utrillo produced nearly twenty years after he painted this one is similar to the extent that both must surely have been based on the same mysterious original image.

According to the Tate Museum, "Certain minor differences suggest that Utrillo made a few compositional adjustments in painting the present work, for example by widening the low building second from left, so that it almost blocks off the side street, but in the later version followed his model more literally. Further and quite symbolically, these are the colors of a slightly worn, lustreless, cold, and seedy Montmartre, the site of, basically, of the artist's ongoing deterioration.

The image is not without cheer, but it is quite subdued. Evidently, this and several other of Utrillo's works were signed by his mother, Suzanne Valadon, rather than the artist himself. This was because his major patron, the collector Louis Labaude, disliked having Utrillo's haphazard signature on the paintings he acquired and insisted Valadon sign them instead.

Maurice utrillo artist biography

Composer Hector Berlioz and his wife lived in the house between to , long before Utrillo came to paint it. In , the Cubist painter, Georges Braque, established his studio in the house and Utrillo may actually have begun the painting around that time, finishing it a few years later. Utrillo is considered to have reached the height of his career between to This particular work was produced during that two year stretch that has been referred to as his "White Period," because white dominated his paintings at that time.

In order to make the white paint even thicker, almost like mortar to build up his two-dimensional structures, he often added plaster, which he applied to the canvas using a palette knife rather than a brush. This painting, while heavily impastoed, is ironically one displaying little pictorial depth. Rather than creating the illusion of volume, Utrillo emphasizes the geometry of the buildings on this particular corner of Montmartre.

It is very likely that the influence of Cubism exerted itself very strongly in his work from the period, including his choice to represent the very building where one of the inventors and major proponents of the Cubist style was working. As with other Cubism-inspired if not fully Cubist works, this painting features nearly flat forms arranged in shallow pictorial space and the characteristic pale, almost monochromatic Cubist palette.

Additionally, Utrillo abruptly changes viewpoints between the two structures pictured here so that the only real depth in the picture is seen in the kind of fragments of shape that the buildings comprise. The two facades of the house are depicted simultaneously here, from two different viewpoints. Utrillo's painting commemorates an important moment in the development of modern art and a monument thereof.