Word: utrillo
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Raiding a purse snatcher's hideout, Paris police were startled to find a signed Utrillo hanging on the wall. That started them on the trail of what may be the biggest ring of art forgers in recent years. Last week Paris cops nabbed the artist who forged the Utrillos. She was one Mme. Juliette Claude La Tour-"Zizi" to her Montmartre friends...
Zizi, a middle-aged little lady with brown, shoulder-length hair, was sorry to be caught, but said she was not a bit sorry to stop copying Utrillo. The 63-year-old modern's cool, empty streets thrilled her not at all, said Zizi. It would be hard to forge the art of her favorites, Da Vinci and Velasquez, she said, "but my Utrillos are better painted than the master...
...naked models in another room so he couldn't see them when he worked. There was savage, ascetic Soutine, who smashed his chair and table to kindling wood so Kiki could be warm; Soutine slept curled up on the floor while Kiki took his bed. And saturnine Maurice Utrillo, who was once so stirred by her magnificent peasant nudity that he painted a brilliant picture of a huge cow barn...
...Paris, he was still not much of an artist, and it was already obvious that his time was short. His lungs were bad. A black-eyed, elegant young fellow, he kept to himself, painted furiously, and destroyed most of it as he went along. Soon Matisse, Picasso, Utrillo and Brancusi took him up, introduced him to cubism, African sculpture, and cafe life. The combination freed him from his academic inhibitions: he began painting pictures that were worth keeping. Then he set about destroying himself...
...Death, a Legend. Hashish and women interested him enormously, but he liked alcohol most. He traded off his fashionable clothes for one baggy, brown velvet suit, and took to staggering up & down the steep streets of Montmartre, drinking wine and coughing blood. He and Utrillo would wander into bars, introducing each other to the drunks inside as the "greatest painter in the world"; when the cops came, Modigliani would be carried off, excitedly reciting Dante to the uncomprehending constabulary. Head-wagging Parisians called him the peintre maudit (cursed painter...