Windswept Family Tree

Marie-Clementine Valadon assured herself of some notoriety when she casually conceived an illegitimate son in the alleys of Montmartre early in 1883. But Suzanne Valadon--as she was renamed by Toulouse-Lautrec, because Suzanne suited her volatile personality better--yearned to be known as more than the mother of Maurice Utrillo. Determined to be an artist in her own right, she painted crude, strong, frank works. Last week Munich's Haus der Kunst was exhibiting a retrospective show that examined the talent of both mother and son.

Neither was burdened with academic art training, but both developed a highly personal style. In an age that no longer considered drawing important, Valadon was a precise draftsman. Such works as Church Hill in Meyzieux (see color) are candidly realistic, rich in color. Utrillo's palette, on the other hand, was subdued, limited to only three or four basic colors, mostly white. Mixing zinc white with white plaster, he captured the luminous effect of shimmering sunlight on the stucco walls of Paris. Though his figures are crude and static, and the same Mont martre scene appears over and over again, such buildings as The Castle at La Ferte-Milon (see color) have a durability that has seldom been matched.

His pictures might be quiet, but his life was not. A drunk at 13, in an asylum at 18, Utrillo was set to painting as occupational therapy. His mother also got around to art in a casual way. The illegitimate daughter of a seamstress, and a gamine of Montmartre, at 15 she aspired to be a trapeze artist with the Cirque Molier in the Place Pigalle. But a fall ended her acrobatic career. She became a model, posed for Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec. Many of the great and small names of the French igth century art world were her easy lovers, and any one of them might have been Maurice's father. One of her lovers, a journalist and critic named Miguel Utrillo, offered the child his name. The idea pleased everyone except the boy, who for years called himself Maurice Valadon, later signed most of his paintings "Maurice Utrillo V"--the "V" for Valadon.

Violent when drunk, Utrillo was so often in jail that the police kept canvas and oils on hand, persuaded him to paint them pictures before they released him. Suzanne took as her lover--and later mar ried--Utrillo's close friend and fellow traveler of the lower depths, Andre Utter. Taking charge of the household, Utter carefully cultivated the Utrillo boom that made them all rich.

In his last years Utrillo was kept at his easel by his shrike-like wife, Lucie Valore, spent several hours daily on his knees soothing his demons before a statue of Joan of Arc. But long before he died in 1955, he ranked just behind Picasso, Braque and Matisse as one of the great names in French art.

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