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Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955) Born Maurice Valadon on December 25, 1883 (Christmas Day) in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, France. The offspring of a liaison between a teen-age model, Marie-Clémentine Valadon, and, so it is thought, a young amateur painter named Boissy. The boy's mother was a clothing-designer and painter's model who posed for Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and as a circus-rider for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Maurice Valadon was only a child when the Spanish writer and art critic, Miguel Utrillo, a friend of his mother's, in a spirit of kindness, bestowed upon him his own name. With no real training, other than what his mother taught him, he drew and painted what he saw all around him in Montmartre. He presented strange landscapes which delighted the man in the street and astonished the connoisseur. These pictures inspired many artists to re-examine their world and, instead of turning to abstraction, once again to re-create reality. Critics only took note of him after 1910. By 1920, he had become a legendary figure, internationally known. In 1929, the French government awarded him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. He died on November 5, 1955, and is buried in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent in Montmartre. |
