A NEW LOOK AT MONTMARTRE

NOTHING SO QUEER AS FOLKS, AND ARTISTIC FOLKS....

The family Valodon by Valodon - Suzanne, her husband, mother, and sad Maurice.

(I’ve been compiling a new book of off-beat walks about Paris; areas and topics a little outside the conventional; food, faith, the Nazi Occupation etc. Museyon will publish in the  fall. Meanwhile, here is a taster from the Montmartre promenade.)

Outside the cathedral, turn right and take cobbled rue du Chevalier-de-la-Barre  towards the center of Montmartre village. Turn right into rue de Mont-Cenis and follow to rue Cortot and No. 12, the Musée de Montmartre.

Situated on the highest point of the butte, dating from 1688 and built on the foundations of an abbey, this is reputedly the oldest building to survive from the original village.  Suzanne Valodon and her son Maurice Utrillo lived here, and the studio welcomed Vincent van Gogh, Raoul Dufy, and composer Erik Satie. Auguste Renoir’s The Garden in the rue Cortot, Montmartre is among his most famous canvases. The house later belonged to composer Gustave Charpentier, a descendant of whom acquired it in 1958. Restored,  it re-opened in 1960 as the Musée de Montmartre, with a garden restaurant.

The museum recreates the Valodon/Utrillo apartment, but its calm domesticity reflects nothing of the drama that took place here. Valadon was only four when her father was sent to Devil’s Island for counterfeiting. Joining a circus,  she worked as an acrobat and trapeze artist. Since she had danced nude in private shows staged by the circus owner, modeling was a logical next step. Exceptionally, she showed artistic talent and, encouraged in particular by Edgar Degas, became an accomplished painter. 

Redhaired, sulky, and voluptuous, she posed for Degas,  Renoir, and Toulouse-Lautrec, among others, and slept with many of them. When, in 1891, she gave birth to a son, she took the boy around the cafés, inviting her clients, any one of whom might be the father, to accept paternity.  Renoir, noted for his flesh tones, told her “It can’t be mine; he has a terrible complexion,” and Degas, who excelled in painting skinny girls of the corps de ballet, protested “He’s too lumpy.” Finally a minor Spanish artist with whom, ironically, she hadn’t slept, Miquel Utrillo y Morhaus, said “I would be glad to put my name to the work of either Renoir or Degas!”

Valodon and Maurice about 1900.

     Valadon left young Maurice with her mother, who followed the custom of chabrot, pouring wine into the dregs of his soup to float out the last morsels. By sixteen the boy was an alcoholic . He also developed a morbid fascination with women—part lust, part fear. Encountering one in the street, he would tremble, whimper, and, if she fled, follow her, though always avoiding physical contact. Valadon, herself eccentric, wearing a bunch of carrots as a corsage and keeping a goat in the studio, to whom she fed her discarded sketches, resignedly placed him in a mental hospital. The institution encouraged painting as therapy, and Maurice showed talent. Valadon installed him in an upstairs room at rue Cortot. To prevent him from sneaking out to get drunk, she locked him in but urged him to paint what he saw—which, for him, meant the streets outside his window. 

Place de Tertre by Maurice Utrillo.

     Providentially, illness imbued his canvases with a desolate beauty. Novelist Francis Carco praised their “leprous walls, livid skies, cold and mournful perspectives,” a corrective to Renoir’s sunny parties and picnics.  Utrillo’s mental health improved with age. Married off to a middle-aged widow, he moved to the country, away from feminine temptations.