Maurice Utrillo, Montmartre, Douze Contemporains, 1959

Description

Lithograph, stencil on wove paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered. Good condition. Notes: From the folio, Douze Contemporains, 1959; published by … more Lithograph, stencil on wove paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered. Good condition. Notes: From the folio, Douze Contemporains, 1959; published by Éditions d'Art du Lion, Paris; rendered by Daniel Jacomet, Paris; printed by l'atelier Jacomet, December 1959. Excerpted from the folio, This album finished printing in December 1959 drawn to nine hundred and seventy examples numbered from I to CMLXX and thirty non-commerce examples numbered from I to XXX, was directed by Daniel Jacomet. Typography of the union printing in paris.

MAURICE UTRILLO (1883-1955) was a French painter of the School of Paris who specialized in cityscapes. From the Montmartre quarter of Paris, France, Utrillo is one of the few famous painters of Montmartre to have been born there. Maurice Utrillo's life could not have been more bohemian. A romantic concept, la vie bohème was for many people who lived such an existence in Paris of the late-19th and early-20th century far less dazzling in reality. Born to the former circus acrobat turned artist's model and eventually avant-garde artist, Suzanne Valadon (she was only 18 at the time) Utrillo never knew who his father was. It was rumored that it could have been anyone from Puvis de Chavannes to Renoir to a young and little known painter named Boissy. When he was 21, Utrillo took up painting at the encouragement of his mother, who had learned to paint while posing for artists like Morisot, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Degas and had become a skillful artist in her own right. Eventually, the two shared a studio in Montmartre. At age 22, he sold his first painting and by 1909 he was exhibiting his work at the prestigious Salon d'Automne. By 1910, he had achieved considerable critical acclaim, having developed a style of landscape painting that combined features of Post-Impressionism and Cubism. His landscapes and cityscapes earned him lucrative sales and national notoriety, including the Cross of the Legion of Honor from the French government in 1928. Despite having been shunned by the French artistic establishment during much of his career, he is considered one of the pioneers of The School of Paris, the pre-World War I, modern artistic movement characterized by experimentation and pluralism. The quintessential struggling artist and also taking a cue from avant garde innovators like Picasso and Degas, Utrillo often used unusual if not everyday materials like cardboard in place of more expensive canvas to produce his paintings. Unlike his idols and mentors, however, Utrillo was virtually untrained and his greatest achievement must surely have been adapting his unrefined technique to successive avant garde styles - Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism - to attain considerable critical and financial success. less