Living in the heart of Montmartre, surrounded by fellow artists and each sharing a home with two other painters with whom they could express themselves freely, Suzanne, Utter and Maurice were deeply content. And with a new home to keep and her family around her, Madeleine accepted the arrangement. Since Suzanne and Utter were both sociable creatures, many of the neighbours became friends too. Besides the pleasure that brought, establishing a widespread network of allies gave Suzanne peace of mind. It was reassuring to know that there were others looking out for Maurice. Her son often staggered out to the Moulin de la Galette in the evening and on many occasions it was only thanks to Severini’s intervention, and assurance that he would escort his neighbour home, that Maurice escaped arrest for being drunk and disorderly.20
For their part, Suzanne and Utter favoured the Lapin Agile, which had undergone a transformation since the eccentric potter Frédé took ownership of the establishment at the turn of the century.
With his long beard, felt hat and boots, the former fish merchant looked something of a cross between Robinson Crusoe and Santa Claus. As a cabaret owner, Frédé had cut his teeth on the popular Zut in the Rue de Ravignan before moving to the Lapin Agile. Installing himself with his ark of animals – not least his beloved old donkey, Lolo – Frédé set out to expand the venue’s clientele and give it a more literary flavour. He wanted to, as he put it, ‘create art’, and so along with painters and musicians, writers and poets received a warm welcome. A ceramicist by day, at dusk Frédé transformed into a compère extraordinaire, bursting with bonhomie and addressing customers in the familiar ‘tu’. Veillées at the Lapin Agile brought together drinkers from across Montmartre, and they would gather around Frédé and the roaring log fire to hear him croon timeless songs as he strummed his guitar. With the crackle of logs and the low lighting, the wafts of pipe smoke and the hum of friendly voices intermingling with the sound of Frédé’s guitar or poetry being recited, the olde worlde ambience offered the perfect environment for creative types to unwind and share ideas. Writers and poets such as Léon-Paul Fargue, Max Jacob and Pierre Mac Orlan, and artists including Georges Braque, André Derain, Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso became regulars. Some poets spoke derisively about the quality of the literature shared and consumed at the cabaret, but the warmth and sense of good cheer usually turned doubters into converts.21
Though at the start of his career Picasso’s attendance was restricted by his self-imposed 10pm curfew (he worked best at night), he and the patron were deeply fond of each other. To compliment the mishmash of pictures, paintings and photographs already adorning the walls, Frédé commissioned Picasso to create a painting to decorate the cabaret and from 1905, the artist’s At the Lapin Agile took pride of place. It depicted Picasso dressed as a harlequin and his current lover Germaine, the downfall of his late friend Casagemas, who committed suicide in 1901. The canvas was bold and bright and highly original. But Picasso did not abandon convention altogether: in the long-standing tradition of painting commissions, Picasso showed the work’s patron in the background, playing his guitar.22
Suzanne relished her evenings with André at the Lapin Agile. The generation of artists who had ruled Montmartre when she was an eighteen-year-old aspirant had almost all moved on. Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Puvis were dead. Miguel had returned to Spain; Renoir had relocated to the sun-drenched climes of Cagnes. Having always been the flighty youngster among seasoned painters, Suzanne was now the veteran with stores of colourful anecdotes to delight her juniors. As a result, she was invariably flanked by a swarm of friends and admirers.
Life was good. But for all the buzz of creativity, living with four adults and their dogs squeezed into the tiny apartment in the Impasse de Guelma quickly became unworkable. Paul Mousis was loath to give up the studio at the Rue Cortot, but he consented to Suzanne having the family house in Montmagny. It made living conditions infinitely more comfortable and the charms of the countryside were not lost on the family, provided Paris was still within easy reach. Even Maurice spoke fondly of the ‘charming orchards, enchanting vineyards’, the simple way of life and the healthy country air.23
But relinquishing the family home was just the first in a series of gestures on Mousis’s part to disentangle himself from the Valadon family and reclaim his honour. Next, he wanted a divorce.
When the estranged husband and wife were summoned on 3 March 1910, Mousis and his lawyer arrived at the court pepped and determined to triumph. But as the hearing commenced, Suzanne was nowhere to be seen.
Mousis’s first witness said that his behaviour towards his wife had been exemplary and that despite that, Suzanne had constantly hassled him for money. The court heard how she treated her husband like a pig, and had been heard to accuse him of harming her career. ‘What will it take to get rid of this man?’ someone remembered overhearing her ask. In addition, she was said to have stayed out all night on several occasions, been repeatedly rude without provocation and her behaviour was unpredictable.24
Suzanne never appeared to defend herself. The divorce had been called by Mousis and whatever accusations were fired at her, she had no intention of hampering the process. Mousis’s request was granted.
The couple’s property was divided up, with Suzanne keeping the house in Montmagny. Then her new life began.
After her divorce, Suzanne began painting furiously. Having spent months struggling to comprehend the perplexing shades of human character, she was seized by a renewed interest in portraiture. She produced many studies of herself and of the members of her reconfigured family, as though seeking to establish in her own mind who and what were now her priorities. She drew a portrait of Maurice on which she inscribed possessively ‘my son’. Madeleine had always been the generic grandmother, but now Suzanne reclaimed her by association, when she painted the dark and intense Maurice Utrillo, His Grandmother and His Dog (1910). In this simplified but severe canvas, Suzanne employed a traditional pyramid-like structure, giving the piece a semi-biblical feel, while simultaneously drawing on contemporary influences from artists like Gauguin and cropping the scene in a style that recalled the work of Japanese woodcut artists. However, traditional rules of perspective were blatantly ignored, with Maurice in the background huge and overbearing, looming over Madeleine, who Suzanne sat with her hands folded in her lap in passive acceptance. The dark background drew attention to the faces, Madeleine tired, haggard and wrinkled, Maurice preoccupied and brooding. It was a disjointed family group, individuals brought together in body, but distinct in spirit, and only the dog, Pierrot, reached across the personal boundaries for affection as he held his paw up to Madeleine. All the social complexities of the preceding months were replayed on Suzanne’s canvas.25
Freed from the constraints of marriage, Suzanne now lifted her vision and began to see things differently. Prompted by Utter, she turned to landscape, producing Tree at Montmagny Quarry (1910) and expanding her palette from five to fourteen colours. She added yellow ochre, raw sienna, light crimson lake, Venetian red, cobalt blue, deep ultramarine, and English and emerald green.26 Over time, she also replaced black with ultramarine blue mixed with vermillion and English green or reddish-brown. Her landscape was rich and full-blooded, warm and gutsy, and she used expressive, confident sweeps of the brush in a manner reminiscent of Cézanne. Nothing in Suzanne’s balanced and bright composition identified the Montmagny quarries as the site of an aggressive strike the previous September.27
The whole, unorthodox family loved Montmagny, but the draw of Montmartre was magnetic. Professionally and spiritually, Suzanne, Maurice and Utter were constantly called back to Paris. Now an arthritic and short-sighted old lady of 79, Madeleine fell into line with the trio, going wherever they deemed fit. With three such intense and passionate characters, there was hardly room for another tempestuous personality. Madeleine resigned herself to her role as a passive adjunct in her daughter’s chaotic life. The household crackled with nervous energy which, when not channelled into painting,
triggered explosive rows and passionate make-ups. The trio were soon baptised ‘The Unholy Trinity’. They became the main protagonists in a long-running domestic drama and even when they retired to Montmagny, Montmartre was still their stage.
As avant-garde art marched forwards, Montparnasse was beginning to rival Montmartre as Paris’s artistic mecca.28 It attracted a number of the art scene’s newest recruits like Modigliani, as well as some more established names including Picasso. Its appeal stemmed from its moderate prices and lively atmosphere, and it was also less tainted by tourism than Montmartre. Nonetheless, Montmartre still had its staunch loyalists, many of whom scorned the crass work now passing for contemporary ‘art’. In the year of Suzanne’s divorce, a group of regulars from the Lapin Agile, headed up by the novelist, journalist and enemy of the avant-garde, Roland Dorgelès, concocted what they considered to be a hilarious hoax.29 Attaching a paintbrush to the tail of Frédé’s much-cherished Lolo, they stood the bewildered creature with its rear pressed up against a blank canvas. Dipping its tail-paintbrush in brightly coloured pigments, they busied the donkey with oats, so that as he swished his tail back and forwards between mouthfuls, the canvas filled with sweeps of bright colour. Onlookers grew hysterical and applauded joyfully when they realised that Lolo’s brushwork could be accelerated by offering him more treats. Delighted, the group published the humorous manifesto of the so-called ‘Excessivists’ to accompany the jest in the paper Le Matin. ‘Let us smash the palettes of our ancestors,’ it declared, ‘make a bonfire of false masterpieces and establish grand principles which should govern the art of tomorrow. Our formula can be reduced to a single word: excessivism […] Long live excess!’30 The document was signed Joachim-Raphaël Boronali (an anagram of Aliboron, the name of a donkey in La Fontaine’s Fables) – the same name attached to the much-hyped Sunset over the Adriatic which was shown at the Salon des Indépendants that spring. People flocked to the Salon to see the canvas everyone was talking about. Lolo was a star. When the painter’s genus was revealed, some (mostly artists) were angry, others amused. But everyone conceded that the exhibition of Lolo’s canvas was a sign of the times. The Journal du Dimanche said what many were thinking: the work was ‘less ridiculous than many others’ on show.31 In 20th-century Paris, taste was increasingly subjective.
For Suzanne and Maurice, that mattered. Without Mousis’s financial support, they depended on the public’s approval of their work to survive. That meant first placating a powerful and notoriously fickle middleman: the dealer.
One busy afternoon at the dealer Druet’s in the Rue Royale, Maurice burst into the gallery, emboldened by alcohol and swaying unsteadily, a folder of paintings under his arm. People whispered and laughed as he weaved his way over to the manager. Art critic Francis Jourdain was visiting the gallery at the time and he watched as Maurice displayed his wares. There were some inspired pieces. Jourdain tried to persuade Druet to give Maurice a chance, but the gallery owner refused. Druet’s accountant also happened to be there, and he agreed to take a canvas. But it was hardly a substantial deal. Irritated by the rejection, and desperate, Maurice staggered back outside and began approaching passers-by, attempting to palm off his paintings as a market seller would surplus fruit.32
Just a few days later, Jourdain was perusing the offerings of another dealer, Louis Libaude, with his colleague, the critic and art historian Dr Élie Faure, when he spotted some works by the same hand he had admired at Druet’s. Libaude was a crafty miser who suffered no fools. Formerly the editor of the publication Art Littéraire, he had subsequently worked as an auctioneer of horses before returning to the art world as a picture dealer, where he had already earned himself a reputation as an unscrupulous cut-throat. Even Jourdain, who knew him well, conceded that he was rapacious, though probably no more of a scoundrel than any other businessman trying to make a living from art. Libaude had first come across Maurice’s paintings at Clovis Sagot’s gallery, where a handsome study of Notre Dame persuaded him to take a chance on the young painter. Bypassing Sagot, Libaude slyly approached Suzanne to negotiate a deal – on the strict understanding that the price he paid remained confidential. However, the work he now had on show was not selling. Nonetheless, Jourdain was enraptured, and told the dealer so. He purchased two pictures of Montmagny for himself, and was so satisfied that he returned to the gallery with some friends – influential friends. They included the writer Octave Mirbeau, the publisher Paul Gallimard, and the Kapferer brothers, who were art enthusiasts. All bought pictures. Word spread. Suddenly, everyone wanted Utrillos. In a world where donkeys produced art for salons, Utrillo offered perspectivally coherent pictures of familiar streets in muted colours, unspoiled by pedestrians and in a form the viewer could recognise. His canvases made contemporary realism palatable. Unwittingly, Maurice had given the public just the visual reassurance they craved. Libaude was delighted, and agreed to negotiate with Maurice directly. He quickly calculated that he could acquire the canvases for little and sell them with a hefty mark-up. A deal was struck. Maurice would earn a pittance, but provided he painted, he would be assured of a regular monthly retainer.33
Suzanne was ecstatic. Maurice had lately learned that his application to study at the École des Beaux-Arts had been rejected, a rebuff he later described as ‘one of the saddest things’.34 This was the break Suzanne had dreamed of for her son. She hurried to thank Jourdain in person for what he had done. It was not for its own sake that the money pleased her. Suzanne truly believed that if only they could afford the best rehabilitation clinics, Maurice could be cured. In her eyes, Libaude was a lifeline who could give her back her son.
For Montmartre’s struggling artists, canvases were like currency whose value was determined by the viewer. Paintings could be exchanged with dealers for cash, or, more often than not, traded with cabaret owners for a hearty meal – or for wine. For the first time in his life, Maurice was the master of his own, ready capital. He took full advantage. The profits from his paintings seldom found their way back to the family pot. Maurice became a well-known character on the Butte’s cast list of local eccentrics. He was nicknamed l’Itrillo, and laughed at by children when they saw him mumbling to himself as he staggered through the streets. He was often seen ricocheting precariously from building to building, or else collapsed in a drunken heap, where he became a punch-bag for merciless louts. On nights when the police hauled him in, the treatment was little better. ‘I am not mad,’ became his frantic cri de coeur.35 Many a time, Suzanne was summoned to come and collect her son from the station and pay whatever the fine amounted to this time.36
But Suzanne had not lost hope. Maurice had work and he had an income. Meanwhile, her own personal and professional life were full of contentment and promise. Her relationship with Utter was unfolding into one extended and glorious honeymoon period. They posed for each other and painted, talked and made love. And the more each discovered about the other, the deeper in love they fell. Suzanne’s art prospered.
Her name was now getting known beyond Paris. By the time Suzanne came to exhibit three pieces in the 1910 Salon d’Automne, word had reached the Limousin that one of their number was achieving great things. The correspondent for Limoges illustré reported: ‘We noticed various enamels by M.L. Jouhaud, a painting by M. Alluaud and several subjects by Mlle Valadon, all three artists originating from Limoges.’37
The following year, Suzanne was offered a solo exhibition by the dealer who first spotted Maurice’s work, Clovis Sagot, in his gallery on the Rue Lafitte. Sales were disappointing, and Sagot grumbled that a series of recent skirmishes in the area no doubt deterred potential visitors.38 Nonetheless, her first one-woman show marked a pivotal moment in Suzanne’s career. And her submission to the Salon des Indépendants that spring received a more cheering response. Limoges illustré was again proud to claim Suzanne as one of their own and commended her work.39 For La Vie Artistique, ‘submissions of a distinguished quality’ were rare in rooms 36–42, but the author singled Suzann
e out for praise as an artist whose drawing was ‘crisp, intelligent and innate’.40
But Suzanne’s success at the Salon des Indépendants was clouded by a disturbing incident. Just after the show opened, Maurice was arrested, and this time, the charge was not only for drunkenness, but for indecent exposure. Suzanne learned how he had terrified passers-by in the Place du Tertre by stripping off his clothes. This time, the situation was beyond Suzanne’s intervention. Maurice was sent to see out a month’s prison sentence.41
Suzanne had often worried that Maurice never displayed any of the hallmarks of a typical young lad with a nascent libido. But the same year as his arrest, he finally had his first sexual encounter (which he later recounted that he did not enjoy). It should have brought Suzanne relief. But in Maurice’s arrest, she saw the harbinger of a more concerning fate.
André Utter adored Suzanne, but his tolerance with his ‘stepson’ was waning. Utter himself was not an especially talented artist. His paintings were mediocre, not exceptional. But what he lacked in painterly skill, he made up for in business acumen. As soon as he moved in with Suzanne, he began guiding her career choices and he attempted to steer Maurice in what he considered to be the best professional direction. Utter was acutely sensitive to the skill and talent of both mother and son, but he also had a profound understanding of the complex market in which they were operating, and he had the interpersonal skills and smooth talk to earn dealers’ trust. Together, the trio had a winning combination.
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