[Маруся]

It is a pity that such a theme as Maurice Utrillo, did not lead the discussion. He was always interested me, and she was interested in the mysterious force that bound the two men - Utrillo and Modigliani - and continued a strange way to exist after their death: When the Russian authorities the opportunity to choose what work to buy something between Modigliani and Utrillo - selected Utrillo and now the museum bought for them. Pushkin, bought - and forgotten. But Modigliani, whose work in no museum of Russia, they know everything. And so, as a kind of law of compensation, perhaps, in a Russian book on Modigliani (* B. Vilenkin. Modigliani. Moscow, 1970) written in the kindest words about Utrillo:

"The first person who introduced Modigliani to Montmartre, Utrillo was. They at once agreed, and immediately found a common language, while talking with Utrillo was usually not easy. If the internal closure Modigliani hint of just a few, the desperate loneliness of his new friend at first sight became apparent. It was enough to see him smile, "timid, but at the same time mocking, and thoughtful," says the writer Francis Karki, who was well Utrillo - a smile that "seemed kind of suffering tick" at a deathly pale, handsome face. Something artless, childish unprotected conspicuous in this lanky young artist, dressed slovenly, sometimes almost beggars, forever spattered paint, something was pitiful in his hurried unsteady gait. Not a local person might seem incredible that it was him and not someone else already established around the Montmartre fame violent drunks and brawlers, and kept the striker mirrors in pubs, very often nochuyuschego in police stations, and the outcast despised "decent people". These attacks usually a drunken rampage quietest man were nothing more than a painful splash of endless longing and repressed despair. They have already prepared it from childhood homelessness and lost souls. Utrillo was the son of Suzanne Valadon, once famous circus acrobat, who posed for Renoir, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas studied at the drawing and painting, and soon became famous as a talented and unique artist, his father, he did not know his name but was obliged to the kindness of one a friend of his mother, had never seen him in the eye with jeers and insults on this occasion Mr. was fed up with both in school and in later years, painting signed stubbornly: "Maurice Utrillo V.", that is, Valadon, because adored his mother.
In Modigliani's always been kind of keen sensitivity to another's suffering, and above all - to all spiritual nastoyaschesti and depth, under whatever ugly scabs, under whatever painful strain or not concealed - he is subsequently repeatedly proved its loyalty to the attachment.
Utrillo, he immediately accepted, despite the fact that the pictures of this self-taught artist, who started with five colors, donated by the mother, then in Montmartre talked much less than his drunken rampage. However, some of the owners of local pubs and little shops have readily accepted them for a pittance, or in payment for the wine.
F. Karki recalls how one of them, a kind father Soulier, traded on the cheap paintings, had happened every morning, waiting for Utrillo, down from Montmartre to write of Notre Dame, to shove him a piece of cardboard, white tube, a tube of some red tube blue, green tube and a bottle of turpentine, adding to his noble gesture is always the same phrase: "That, my dear, you are quite enough to make a masterpiece. (F. Carco. L'ami des peintres. Paris., Gallimard, 1953)