Lot 59 D

Among Utrillo’s many classic views of Montmartre and its village-like atmosphere, seemingly frozen in time, the present image featuring steeply rising, crowded and colourful houses before the dome of Sacré-Cœur is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful. The Parisian motif has become a popular tourist attraction of the city and of all times: with its freshness and decidedly narrative taste, it radiates a pleasant impression on those nostalgic natures seeking a long-lost bohème in the twisting old lanes of “la butte”. The buildings with their shutters, the grocers’ writing on the walls, a picturesque lantern and impressionistic vegetation: in his image of the little world of this quaint neighbourhood, Utrillo’s characteristic figures bustle about, resurrecting those charming back ways of the turn of the century which had already fascinated van Dongen.
“To paint, he instinctively uses the colours that are richest in content, those which immediately reveal every alteration and nonetheless preserve the freshness of the initial impulse. In his work the colour white takes on every tone, drinks up every light, receives water, shocks, scrapes, shifts from warm to cold, from dry to damp, from light to dark, from matt to shiny, from the most ordinary to the finest. And he surrounds and nourishes this elemental, noble attitude of colour with a tannery brown, interrupts it with an acidic green or a fierce red which provide his chromatic creations with a peculiar depth” (Pierre Courthion, cited in: Maurice Utrillo V./Suzanne Valadon, exh. cat. Munich (Haus der Kunst) 1960, p. XI).