Art: Monsieur Maurice

Many a piner for Paris, thinking of Montmartre, is apt to picture a steep street scene or café terrace by Utrillo, bright with chill, white, geometric charm. Parisians themselves see other Parises than Utrillo’s pristine pictures represent, but they have long admired, and bought, his art. Last week Paris honored the aging (64) painter with a Salon d’Automne, the fall season’s big show, built around his life’s work.

Utrillo’s mother, Suzanne Valadon, had begun life as an acrobat and made herself the leading woman painter in France. A gallant Spanish writer gave Utrillo his name, but his real father’s beginning & end were obscure, and all he left Maurice was a thirst for Pernod—a burdensome inheritance.

Suzanne soon accustomed herself to getting up in the middle of the night to rescue her son from the gendarmes. In the mornings she shoved him outdoors to paint. The neighbors, watching Utrillo sketch, red-eyed and miserable, at street corners, nicknamed him “Monsieur Maurice de Montmartre.”

He turned out as many as 200 pictures a year—all of them pretty much alike. They caught on just after World War I, and Montmartre cafe owners, who had made a generous habit of accepting “Monsieur Maurice’s” paintings in payment for drinks, cleaned up at close to $1,000 a picture.

Nowadays Utrillo lives outside of town, in a big house christened Villa de la Bonne Lucie in honor of the energetic woman he married in 1935. Lucie keeps the wine locked up in the cupboard; Utrillo goes on painting anyway.

But critics have complained that his new pictures can’t compare with those of the dear, dead-drunk days, and Paris’ Les Arts went so far as to report that “The lamp is going out, while those who surround the artist . . . more ferocious than the managers of boxing champions, are trying to squeeze out of him a production which normally should be on the decline.”

When a TIME correspondent visited Lucie’s villa last week to ask Utrillo about the old times on Montmartre, the painter mumbled that he had not been there for months. Then he perked up and added: “But there’s hardly an hour when I don’t think of it.”