Lot 333 N

Born in Paris in the 1880s, the young Maurice Utrillo took his cue from the Impressionist art of his time. Self-taught, he was impressed by the light-suffused paintings of Alfred Sisley; indeed, light was to become a crucial constant in Utrillo's own work. However, Utrillo's scenes never became dematerialized into abstract colourscapes. Instead, they retained a remarkable clarity in terms of figuration and their rootedness in a specific place. As a child of the Montmartre, the painter spent even his earliest years in the place that was to shape his creative work so strongly, and to which he was drawn time and again. It was here that he found the atmospheric scenes that were to make his works famous the world over.

Utrillo was able to retain his iconic formal idiom throughout all of his creative phases, with his work varying mostly in the intensity of its colouration: While his early oeuvre was still dominated by darker shades, Maurice Utrillo discovered light in Brittany. Gleaming brightly, the luminous white works created around 1910 seem almost overexposed. From about 1915 onwards, as he was increasingly losing his eyesight, Utrillo found his way back to colour once more. The present view of the Rue Lépic on the Montmartre in Paris impressively shows how sensitively Utrillo developed his masterful differentiation of white through careful colouration. The composition thus does not only gain its specific dynamic through the slight bend in the road and the people inhabiting the scene, which are rendered in a way typical for the artist, but also through the confidently placed colour accents. The painterly handling of the poster wall to the right appears almost experimental, the painter having provided it with an expressive texture by employing loose brush marks staggered one above the other.