MADMAN OF MONTMARTRE

...HI As an artist, Utrillo has so many shortcomings that an entire volume cbuld be written about them...

...Van Gogh would do a crazy thing—but only once...

...He became the painter of Montmartre, that romantic hill where, until 1914, artists lived in small courtyard studios, hidden from the narrow streets which radiated from the main square, Place du Tertre...

...From low tonality he could shift to orgies of hot and high-keyed colors, thickly applied in the impasto of Les Fauves...

...Married, wealthy, respected, he made a social adjustment that puzzles psychiatrists...

...When he drank like a fish, his hands were not shaky, and his vision was not blurred, for alcohol apparently released the timid young man, who lacked love, friendship, and guidance, from his inhibitions...

...II Oddly, this complete absence of people produces a great deal of drama in this apparently undramatic world...

...Without her watchfulness Maurice might have gone back to Montmartre, to excessive drinking, and—to real artistry...

...As a boy, Utrillo had seen the few windmills that remained on Montmartre to the end of the 19th Century...

...To his untrained mind the term "abstraction" cannot possibly have meant very much, yet often he reduced houses, chimneys, and windows to geometrical statements of an austerity anticipating the bold experiments of Piet Mondrian and De Stijl...

...During that period, he was locked up in mental institutions at least a dozen times, often escaping through the window to find his way back to Montmartre dives...

...All that the counterfeiters can ever hope to duplicate is Utrillo's manner and mannerisms —not his astonishing feeling for construction, and never his unerring sense of color relation...

...When his mother went off with a wealthy lover, Maurice was left in the care of his ignorant grandmother...

...Madame Utrillo has not forgotten the incident of 1941...

...He did not take liberties with the sights as he saw them, but drew them with the accuracy of an architect preparing a blueprint...

...Now middle-aged, respectable, and well-to-do, she unwittingly impaired his genius by abruptly transferring the sinner to a secluded castle, and forcing abstinence upon him...

...But even there his genius—or his illness—narrowed his field to the least glamorous aspects of La Butte Mont' mattte...

...These were the years when the ugly madman Utrillo would attack people, kick pregnant women, and smash fire alarms...

...Seventy years ago, on Dec...

...She makes sure that her "prisoner," physically still quite fit, keeps busy with work, except for the time he eats, sleeps, prays in his private chapel, or is summoned forth like an automaton to pose for photographers, to nod to collectors, journalists, and other important visitors...

...Or, at best, he would be an inmate of a mental hospital somewhere in France, one of thousands of cranky old men who linger on, helpless, hopeless, a burden to society...

...But his instinct forbade him to sacrifice the plasticity of form to the flickering atmosphere...

...That Parisian woman painter who, caught as a forger, claimed brashly in court that "her" Utrillos were "better painted than the master's" proved only her lack of understanding...

...These were the years when his evenings usually ended in police stations—in one of them he tried to kill himself by hitting his head against the walls...

...They survive only on the master's canvases with their vanes still gaily revolving in the breeze...

...Even in his "dry" period his behavior was strange...

...Had the master died or at least stopped painting twenty-five years ago, his status would be undiminished by the pitiable daubs of his middle years and old age, and unmarred by the countless fakes that have been mass-produced in recent years...

...Indeed, when he was nearly sixty, he escaped from the beautiful villa at Le Vesinet which his prudent wife had acquired from the fantastic sales of his canvases...

...But Utrillo is immortal not because he is a chronicler of old Montmartre...

...It was, perhaps, his pathological misanthropy that led him to devote himself almost exclusively to landscape painting...

...Most of his best work was done in that period...

...Werner edited the Little Art Book series and served as an editor of the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia...

...But most of these houses made way for large, modern residences...

...A worse angel was the rigidly bourgeois Lucie Pauwels, an energetic widow and the personification of respectability who married Utrillo in 1936 when Suzanne Vala-don was too old and weak for this double job of nurse and jailer...

...Unlike his friend Modigliani, who drew les Parisiennes as slender, sensitive beauties, Utrillo painted them only as large-hipped, plump fishwives, reflecting his contempt for women...

...When all the gossip about him is forgotten, Utrillo will be remembered, not as the wedding guest of Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan, but as the man who impressed on millions of art lovers his stark vision of the Place du Tertre, Sacre-Coeur, or Le Lapin Agile...

...After hours of anxiety Madame Lucie found him sleeping beside a tramp in a barn after having gotten drunk in a village bar...

...Seeing herself as a Joan of Arc who has conquered the enemy Alcohol, she takes no chances...

...People who have tried to involve him in conversation gave it up after the master showed that he had nothing to offer but a few repetitive phrases of no consequence...

...These were the years when Utrillo's excesses provided Montmartre with regular amusement, as he, alone, or accompanied by his boon companion Modigliani, shouted and staggered from bistro to bistro...

...Morbidly shy, withdrawn, and a poor student, Maurice discovered alcohol when he was about ten...

...Hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of oils were produced in the first two decades of Utrillo's career...

...When, in 1929, the much-coveted Cross of the Legion of Honor was bestowed upon him, the artist hardly understood what the ceremony was about, and, in the presence of illustrious guests, absent-mindedly played with some yellow leaves or twirled his hat...

...Still—I'd trade, any time, a Rolls-Royce for a first-rate "White Period" Utrillo...

...In other oils a few people are visible—but only as color spots whose sole function it is to act as focal points holding the composition together...

...His articles on modern art have appeared in a score of publications, including Commentary, The American Scholar, and The Saturday Review of Literature...

...In some paintings no people are seen in the street, gas lights seem to take the place of pedestrians and, in so doing, create an eerie effect...

...It appears in Utrillo's canvases as a floating white mass of granite and marble, the hemisphere of its cupola balanced by the almost rhomboid planes of old houses in the foreground...

...Supplied with materials by his mother, by now herself a painter, Maurice did, indeed, accept this as a part-time substitute for drink...

...To historians of art Utrillo is as much of a puzzle as to psychiatrists...

...Instead, in violation of all the rules, he became one of the most famous painters of France...

...And yet — there is something hauntingly unreal about this photographic "realism...

...Maurice was the unwelcome result of Mademoiselle Valadon's affair with a chronic dipsomaniac who himself was the offspring of an alcoholic father and a psychotic mother who committed suicide...

...A doctor recommended that the boy find some manual occupation, such as painting, to divert him from drinking...

...26, 1883, Maurice Utrillo was born in Montmartre...

...From about 1902 to 1923, Utrillo's time was evenly divided between painting and drinking...

...He worked with a patience and meticulousness reminiscent of the old masters, and thus gave the buildings he painted unmatched stability and durability...

...Yet one gets suspicious upon noticing a certain rigid one-sidedness in his work...

...His "maniere blanche" pictures are still fresh and lively after forty years, while many far more ambitious creations produced around 1910 have sunk into well-deserved oblivion...

...What is astonishing is that the work Utrillo produced in this period is so "normal," so well-composed that only the trained mind may detect traces of a neurotic nature...

...To increase this surrealist magic, there are no people looking out from the windows...

...There are a few horrible portraits, awkward, childish, and endowing the sitter with a dismal ugliness...

...Here are the facts...

...Unfortunately, Americans who have not been abroad have not had a chance to see Utrillo's best work, and have, instead, been subjected to too many of his recent daubs...

...He knew and seemingly admired the Impressionists who tried to represent nature in a shimmer of light, and, like them, he endeavored to look at nature objectively...

...the shutters are always drawn...

...More recently, close to seventy, he confided to a reporter: "One day I'm going to run away, and go back to Montmartre where I belong...

...Utrillo has no literary talent —the "poems" he wrote are simply ridiculous...

...He baffles us by the utter absence of intellectual concepts, the lack of selectivity, the endless repetition of the same motif in the same manner, and the total lack of self-criticism which, even in his best period—19081914, when he painted in the "Maniere blanche"—permitted the creation of both unbelievably inferior works and indisputable masterpieces...

...He painted the Paris that has the beautiful wrinkled face of an old woman, not the ethereal and frivolous city, weightless and drifting into the air like a child's balloon, as we know it from Dufy's light and fragrant sketches...

...An artist's work is more important than the life he led, and it is of little significance that Utrillo tossed off many of his oils in pubs in exchange for a bottle, or that some of his best works were done with the aid of picture postcards...

...and some of them are the prized possession of galleries in Paris and London...

...ALFRED WERNER, Vienna-born art critic who has written and lectured widely in the United States and Europe, is the author of "Utrillo," a portfolio of reproductions and commentary for the "Library of Great Painters" series published by Harry N. Abrams...

...However poor the quality of these recent oils, even they are better than the best fakes...

...He belongs to no school, and yet he is, or rather was, a classicist, a romantic, a realist, an Impressionist, a Fauve, an Expressionist, a Surrealist, and even an Abstractionist rolled into one...

...He preserved the Rue du Mont-Cenis, Rue Saint-Vincent, Rue Ravignan for the nostalgic heart...

...Later, in the mid-twenties, people appear as recognizable human beings, but the artist's misanthropic attitude can still be inferred from the fact that the figures are nearly always moving away from the spectator...

...As an adolescent, Marie - Clementine became a circus acrobat until a fall from the trapeze stopped this career, after which she became an artist's model...

...the "White Period" pictures that are to be had today fetch prices from $7,000 to $12,000, and are well worth that much...

...He had no training whatever, except for what he got from his mother, who was practically self-taught...

...He did best with landscapes, or, more precisely, with the old crumbling walls of Montmartre...

...His canvases will survive all the changes wrought by civil authorities who have tried to clean up Montmartre...

...Surprisingly, and fortunately for us, the story does not end there...

...Van Gogh was mentally unbalanced, and, for periods of time, insane in the clinical sense of the term...

...at one point, he abruptly left the festive table to attack the keys of a piano like a naughty child...

...The artist did better, but not much better, with flowers...

...London's famous Tate Gallery, exhibiting his work in 1937, committed the understandable error in the catalogue of stating that Utrillo had died years before, a victim of alcoholism...

...but he was an extremely well-read, highly intelligent man who, in addition to his artistic genius, possessed a great literary talent, revealed in his letters...

...that is to say, a factory job for—-a miracle...

...But he won't...

...To render the color of the walls as correctly as possible, he mixed the zinc white with plaster, and applied it with his palette knife in heavy impasto, the way a mason covers bricks with plaster...

...They are usually women, and usually unattractive...

...His mother, Marie-Clementine Val-adon, was the illegitimate daughter of a poor peasant who toiled in Paris as a charwoman, while the child roamed the streets, filching leftovers from restaurants...

...The way his wife and dealers collaborate to exploit this shell of a man has been much criticized in France: "The lamp is going out," declared Les Arts, "while those who surround the artist . . . are trying, more ferociously than the managers of boxing champions, to squeeze out of him a production which normally should be on the decline...

...By eighteen he had to be confined in an institution as a pathological drunkard...

...his work, or part of it, will survive as great art...

...When, seven years later, dynamic Lucie Pauwels had coaxed him into marrying her, he shocked the wedding guests by his absent look and uncertain speech...

...Not the great spontaneity of his style, and not this unique combination of child-like naivete with the demoniacal fire that is the unmistakable stamp of genius...

...Like many a primitive painter, Utrillo, in his attempt to achieve the utmost of realism, unwittingly and unwillingly submerged his work in an atmosphere of surrealism...

...Perhaps his mother, who, in the meantime, had substituted the elegant "Suzanne" for the more common "Marie-Clementine") overdid the business of saving her son when, in the mid-twenties, she got to him the second time...

...Maurice remained a part-time alcoholic to the age of forty, but one who most of the time somehow managed to balance his self-destructive tendencies through projection on canvas...

...Focusing upon edifices of banal architecture, with no historical interest, he succeeded in eternizing them, investing inanimate shapes with a strange life of their own...

...The basilica of Sacre-Coeur is still in existence unchanged...

...If Van Gogh cut off his ear and shot himself by the age of thirty-seven, how did the equally, if not more, unbalanced Maurice Utrillo manage this year to reach three-score and ten, and remain healthy enough to look forward to another decade of active life...