Maurice Utrillo
Painted Montmartre streets from postcards, taught to paint as a cure for drinking.
Maurice Utrillo was born in Paris in 1883 to the eighteen-year-old artist and former circus performer Suzanne Valadon; he never knew who his father was and took the name of a Spanish critic who agreed to acknowledge him. His mother taught him to paint in 1902 in an attempt to treat his alcoholism, which had begun in his teens and which shaped the rest of his life. The white period of roughly 1909 to 1914 — Montmartre streets, church facades and walls painted with plaster and zinc white mixed into the pigment — is the work everything else is measured against. He died in 1955.
The white period leads by a very wide margin, and the long later output, much of it painted from postcards in a sweeter and more decorative manner, is a broad and far more modest field; conflating the two is the commonest error owners make. Utrillo is among the most forged French painters of the century, both in his lifetime and since, and expert opinion is normally required. The Petrides catalogue raisonne is the reference. There is a large output of lithographs and reproductions frequently offered as original prints.
If you own a work by Maurice Utrillo
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