Maurice UTRILLO (Paris, 1883 - Dax, 1955) Lot n° 56

LE MOULIN DE SANNOIS SOUS LA NEIGE Vers 1945 Oil on canvas Signed lower right Maurice Utrillo, V. Signed lower left Sannois (Seine et Oise) 46 x 54,6 cm Certificate of the Utrillo-Valladon Committee Provenance: - Madsen Gallery, Paris; - Mrs. Jack Rothenberg, Palm Beach; - Sale Sotheby's, New York, May 16 and 17, 1979, lot 274; - Private collection, Europe; - Private collection, New York; - Sale Sotheby's, New York, November 14, 1985, lot 300A; - Swiss collection. Of the Sannois mill, Utrillo paints here a vanished state. Its roof, then laid out as a terrace, served as a tourist viewpoint. The "guinguette", below, and the people who flock to it attest to the popularity of the site. The building, which is quadrangular in its upper part, is well positioned in the centre and shows one of its four sides. Utrillo omits the lower part, which is rounded, as this mill is pivotal, in two parts. The palette is subtle, with the winter sky slightly pink, promising new snow to add to that which has already fallen. Between these clear, almost immaculate planes, the dark mass of the mill asserts its monumentality. Were it not for its wings, it would look like a dungeon; to which, wisely aligned on the left, the small coloured dice of the houses of Sannois, would come to swear allegiance. The size of the characters does not obey the decrease wanted by the laws of the perspective. His art, poetic, is precisely in this freedom taken with the classical codes to privilege the touch and the color. A certain freshness comes from it. Edmond Jaloux in L'Art vivant wrote wonderfully about Utrillo: "Perhaps one was surprised at first by a certain naivety in his way of painting, a certain ingenuity in his way of feeling... In reality Utrillo is a true painter, with a subtle, varied, complex sense of color with which he gives to the norms, to the desperate aspects of modern life something magnificently luxurious...".