La Belle Epoque

#89017     31″ X 24″    ac

Among the many painters who have depicted Montmartre, none can surpass Maurice Utrillo in capturing the neighborhood’s paticular charm. Utrillo was a child of La Butte, where he lived since 1905. He knew every street, every wall, every garden, every brick around the Sacre-Coeur. An alcoholic, Utrillo sought refuge in painting, which has been introduced to him by his mother, Suzanne Valaton.

Urtillo loved to use a richly nuanced color of white, a thick mixture like the plaster of Montmartre’s walls. To build his Montmartre scenes, he then juxaposed this white with solid brown, rosy-tinted gray, acid green, earthly-blue, and chromatic black; often under a gray-pink sky.

In T.F.Chen’s “La Belle Epoque,” we see Vincent van Gogh striding up to Utrillo’s “Les Moulins de la Galette” (c.1911). A large poster of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Le Moulin Rouge” is posted near the entrance. The Eiffel Tower partially appears on the left. The compostion as well as the subject is similar to a preceding painting, “The Moulin de la Galette at Montmartre” (1840) by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Yet seventy years have passed between the time limit that Corot painted this scene of Montmarte and from Utrillo ‘s depiction; and Van Gogh and Lautrec’s poster are still there. Once an image becomes an “icon”, it defeats time and lives eternally.

– T. F. and Julie Chen

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Maurice Utrillo, an illegitimate child of Susanne Valadon who was introduced by Toulouse-Lautree to Degas who taught and encouraged her to paint. As her son grew up and became alcoholic, she forced him to paint as a kind of ” Occupational Therapy” and discovered his talent as a painter.

In this ” La Belle Epoque” by T.F. Chen, Toulouse – Lautrec’s poster of a scene at the Moulin Rouge appeared on the wall of Utrillo’s Montmartre, as Van Gogh’s everlasting silhouette of carrying painting materials was in front of the gate. A portion of the Eiffel Tower surged overwhelming on the upper left side of the work. All is quite and subdued except the noisy poster and Van Gogh’s dressing.

It seems to manifest an aftermath disillusion of the 1900 Would Fair in Paris during the Belle Epoque. Celebrations come and go, only the arts remain. Without the flowering of artistic creations, we may find the Belle Epoque banal and wasteful.

– T. F. Chen