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Lot Essay
From a young age, Utrillo began depicting urban landscapes with originality and a recognizable style of quiet simplification. Roland Dorgelès recounted, "his production never seemed faithful enough for him...To render color, he crushed his tubes of paint and went into a rage when he couldn't find the right one. 'They're not in silver-white, the façades, are they? Not in zinc white...They are made of plaster...' He absolutely needed to obtain the exact same chalky white" (quoted in D. Franck, Bohemian Paris, New York, 2001, p. 10).
As Utrillo’s health began deteriorating in 1909 due to alcoholism, he was often unable to paint outdoors. His mother, the artist and model Suzanne Valadon, often brought him postcards to inspire him, allowing him to find new subjects and continue painting—the present work, depicting the small village of Maixe, located in Lorraine in Eastern France, was likely inspired by such a postcard. Here, Utrillo depicts the village under snow, the whites contrasting with the vivid colors of the figures’ attires, the bright reds of the walls, and of course, of the tricolor French flag, visible in the center of the composition. Painted in thick impasto, Commune de Maixe (Meurthe-et-Moselle) is reminiscent of the artist’s “white” period, when he was known to mix plaster into his oil paint, or create a mixture of plaster and glue as the proper substitute for that particular white not found among his paint tubes.
Utrillo's artistic genius was unwavering with a remarkable gift for composition and unerring sense of color relation. Utrillo's one-time agent, the dealer Louis Libaude observed, "Utrillo excels in painting the cracked walls of the old houses. The smallest miserable façade takes on in his paintings an extraordinary intensity of color and life" (Maurice Utrillo, exh. cat., Galerie Eugène Blot, Paris, 1913).
The present work was acquired by the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in 1988, and remained in the museum’s collection ever since.
As Utrillo’s health began deteriorating in 1909 due to alcoholism, he was often unable to paint outdoors. His mother, the artist and model Suzanne Valadon, often brought him postcards to inspire him, allowing him to find new subjects and continue painting—the present work, depicting the small village of Maixe, located in Lorraine in Eastern France, was likely inspired by such a postcard. Here, Utrillo depicts the village under snow, the whites contrasting with the vivid colors of the figures’ attires, the bright reds of the walls, and of course, of the tricolor French flag, visible in the center of the composition. Painted in thick impasto, Commune de Maixe (Meurthe-et-Moselle) is reminiscent of the artist’s “white” period, when he was known to mix plaster into his oil paint, or create a mixture of plaster and glue as the proper substitute for that particular white not found among his paint tubes.
Utrillo's artistic genius was unwavering with a remarkable gift for composition and unerring sense of color relation. Utrillo's one-time agent, the dealer Louis Libaude observed, "Utrillo excels in painting the cracked walls of the old houses. The smallest miserable façade takes on in his paintings an extraordinary intensity of color and life" (Maurice Utrillo, exh. cat., Galerie Eugène Blot, Paris, 1913).
The present work was acquired by the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in 1988, and remained in the museum’s collection ever since.