When we lived in Paris, my daughters and I used to wander the streets of Montmartre. We bought papers and pencils in a nearby shop and sat at the restaurant’s terrace in the small building, the one in the right side on Utrillo’s painting. We tried to draw the Sacre Cœure like the painters of the Place du Tetre, one of them even came over and gave advices how to draw.
Utrillo’s paintings are timeless and eternal until the houses of Montmarte will stand still. Considering the fact that Maurice Utrillo was born at Montmartre, most of his life lived there, and died there as well, we can say he painted his childhood, when he painted the houses, the streets, and lamps of the butte. He depicted the sloping streets, the tavern where his mother, the model and painter Suzanne Valadon, danced on the counter, everything, which meant something to him.
Where we only see an empty street, Utrillo saw a playground. The white façade buildings are his friends on his lonely walks. The street lamps showed the way home on the dark, winter nights when Utrillo was too drunk to find it himself. Who his father was? He never knew, but legends say he could be even Renoir or Degas, or any bartender at the Montmartre.
Utrillo’s mom, Suzanne Valadon started to teach him to draw and paint as a therapy for his mental problems. He depicted almost only Montmartre cityscapes in his life. He knew every corner there, every brick, and every blade of grass. He did not paint too many people in the streets; he was interested in the place itself. That was Utrillo’s therapy, his world, the stable point in his life to hang on.
Utrillo shows the city as landscapes show the countryside, the fields and trees, the dusty roads. His paintings are the city people’s landscapes. Our trees are the shuttered windows, and our dusty roads are the pitched streets. Our faith is to melt into the gray crowd, unless we do something wonderfully memorable, like a painting depicting a Montmartre street, which reminds some one of her life there and write about it and others maybe read it and think they have their own wonderful memories of this street and so the wonder goes on and on forever, like the whiteness of the Sacre Cœure.
