Maurice Utrillo - Printemps in Montmartre

The subject of the work is typical of the work of Maurice Utrillo, who achieved international fame precisely through his study and research into the representation of urban landscapes. The urban landscape was already a popular subject in the Middle Ages and Modern Ages, but predominantly in an idealized manner. Scenes of city life became typical themes with a more realistic interpretation starting in the 19th century. It is worth remembering that immediately following the realist currents of the 19th century, the Impressionists also placed great emphasis on the everyday, on everyday life, with a certain predilection, however, for the frenetic pace of the city, its crowds, traffic, and typically bourgeois settings. Maurice Utrillo's artistic career immediately fit into the Parisian Impressionist context, embracing the cityscape as his preferred subject. But unlike the other masters of Impressionism, Utrillo eliminated the bourgeois element just mentioned, as he was not interested in narrating the lives of people and the frenetic, mundane activity of the city. Utrillo wants to let the city itself speak for itself, with its buildings, churches, streets, and squares. For this reason, his urban views are almost entirely devoid of human presence.

The images composed by Maurice Utrillo are always postcard-like. In the sense that they are based on views solidly grounded in compositional balance. And here we can already measure the distance from the Impressionists, where for the latter it was essential to capture the frenetic and unrepeatable moment of life. Utrillo's image, on the other hand, is more thoughtful, studied in minute detail, just like a postcard. And this is how we arrive right at the heart of Utrillo's compositional conception, in whose mind the urban landscape is broken down into a set of lines and squares. We can also see the result in our work, in which the artist fundamentally uses two expressive means: the clear, bold line and the quadrangular color field. Thus the city view is interpreted as a mosaic whose various colored pieces come together to form a harmonious and always lively whole. This is Utrillo's way of capturing the life of the city through its buildings and streets. And this is where the painterly style comes into play, which, along with compositional balance, is the other fundamental component in Maurice Utrillo's urban expressionism. Our artist's technique is always complex and dynamic, capable of imbuing objects with vibrations that are no longer atmospheric, as with the Impressionists, but truly existential. From here, the distance from the past is definitively measured, in a pictorial conception now fully twentieth-century, with an Expressionist imprint.

The work is a reproduction based on a work by Maurice Utrillo. Utrillo was born in Paris in 1883. He was almost entirely self-taught (aside from paintings by Suzanne Valadon, which also depicted views of Montmartre), yet he displayed precocious talent. By the 1910s, his work had begun to attract critical attention. By the 1920s, he had become an international celebrity, so much so that in 1928, the French government awarded him the Legion d'Or. Utrillo passed away in Dax on November 5, 1955.

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