Maurice Utrillo

(French, 1883–1955)

Maurice Utrillo was a French artist noted for his naïve yet picturesque cityscapes. Rendered in thickly troweled paint, the artist portrayed the winding streets and alleyways in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris. “On a particularly boring day, I had a clever but unfortunate inspiration,” he reflected. “I seized a piece of cardboard, some tubes of tint and petroleum base—since I lacked real oil—and, confronting a typical Montmartre street corner, I suddenly found myself a practitioner of this difficult and thankless art of painting.” Born Maurice Valadon on December 26, 1883 in Paris, France, his mother was the painter and artist’s model Suzanne Valadon. With the encouragement of his mother and his admiration for the Impressionists Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro, Utrillo embarked on a career as an artist. Largely self-taught and suffering from bouts of madness, he was referred to as one of the les maudits (the cursed) along with his friend Amedeo Modigliani. The two painters, led an alcohol-fueled bohemian lifestyle, which ultimately led to the latter’s untimely death. Utrillo died on November 5, 1955 in Dax, France. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, among others.