Windmills of Montmartre
- Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955)
- Oct 19, 2016
- 2 min read
This 1949 painting by Utrillo exhibits superior execution. The fresh colors are subtly blended, creating a rustic vista of old Paris. The hills of Montmartre were once dotted with dozens of windmills used to grind the wheat grown on the plains below. The last standing windmill became home to Le Moulin de la Galette, a famous night club. Le Moulin Rouge was converted to a movie house.
Maurice Utrillo was a French painter born as Maurice Valadon, son of Marie-Clementine "Suzanne" Valadon, an acrobat, model, and artist, who was well acquainted with several famous artists.
Commentary by Alfred Werner (1953):
One may recognize the influence of Pissarro and Cezanne, but his solidity of composition, his gift for simplification, and his unerring sense of color relation are instinctive to him. Just as he is not a primitive, neither is he a classicist, a realist, an Impressionist, a Fauve, an Expressionist, nor even a romantic. He is a complete individualist who defies all classifications. It is customary to concentrate on the pictures of his “white period,” when roughly between 1909 and 1914, white tints and shades were prominent in his work. However, the years preceding those of his “white period” yielded many fine paintings; and in the paintings of his later “colorist period” he often used bright and gay hues successfully.
Utrillo is one of the few contemporary painters whose works please sophisticated as well as simple tastes. Despite changing fashions and fluctuations of the market, his canvases bring higher and higher prices with each year—good Utrillos of the “white period” are sold for thousands of dollars.