Honour for Insane Artist

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 560, 12 January 1929, Page 23

Honour for Insane Artist

(Continued from Page 22) martre. He carried his palette, his paint tubes and his brushes about with him in his ragged clothes and dashed off most of his work on pieces of cardboard, barroom walls and even in the washrooms. As he never had money, a barkeeper would demand a painting of some sort for a bottle of wine, and he would work like a demon for several hours in order to have nis drink. And then, craving more liquor, he would agree to do another scene, so that most of his work was done when he was intoxicated. In fact, he was never sober, and so he was the butt of all sorts of coarse jokes. It w r as sport to invite “Monsieur Maurice” to have a drink and then drop cigarette ashes in his glass when he was not looking. If he burst out into one of his insane fits of anger, out he went! He could sleep in the gutter or be dragged off

to the police station for the night, just as he chose. Perhaps this early barroom painting was crude, but there was a strange realism about it that gripped even his riffraff associates. These works are valued much, more highly to-day than his later and more polite productions. "Utrillo is the first painter to make a drunkard's vision important,” says a London newspaperman named Georgs Slocombe, who is one of the best biographers of this strange figure. "His strange, flat, unearthly landscapes, adventures into the crazy country ot the dipsomaniac, seem actually to have elbowed out the Corots and Poussins of an older school. His is the painting of a man who can neither read nor write. It is a crude literature spread on canvas with a brush dipped in wine and gall. The Butts Montmartre, scene of all the misery, I torment and rare ecstasy of his life; the wan suburbs of Ivry. Levallois; the dirty grey town of Sannois, became the spectral background of a melancholy and lonely soul's struggle w ith the dark angels. “What is the curious, absorbing quality of Utrillo The early pictures, the daubs of his period of complete physical degradation, have an emotional appeal which painters recognise but affect to deplore and which writers invariably and naturally admire. The most pathetic side of his life is the ceaseless effort he made to save himself from his awful appetite. Time and again he went to the home of ; some friend, or some private sanatorium, and literally begged on his knees to be taken in and saved from ' himself. In some cases he signed contracts with the directors of these sanatoria to paint so many pictures i tor bis keep. As usual, ho would ! paint from memory. But after one or two days this I sober, drinkless existence would bej come unbearable, and he would wreck I the place to escape from it. As his work skyrocketed in value picture dealers invaded Montmartre and ripped out entire walls of dirty little bars to procure the paintings. He rarely painted on canvas in his early days, not having the few- sous necessary to buy it. His finest pictures are on scraps of cardboard and wrapping paper. Utrilio s condition became worse and worse, and his friends had him sent to a sanatorium near Lyons two years ago. Learning recently that all hope had been given up of his recovery, the French Government awarded him the Legion of Honour. A number of other distinguished painters secured permission to present it to him, and so an Imposing delegation went down there the other day. It was the first time the Legion of Honour had ever been presented to a madman. By some chance he had a lucid moment when they arrived, but he only: stared blankly when one of them pinned the little red ribbon on hig lapel.