Sarah Baylis’ Utrillo’s Mother

A book that you read compulsively, forgetting your world, and slipping into another. Sarah Baylis’ wonderful “Utrillo’s Mother” is dark, comical, and intense. It is an experience to meet Clementine and through her Suzanne Valadon—a famous french painter (Maurice Utrillo’s mother).

Here’s a passage:

This was the year that Fatin-Latour got his big gloomy picture into the Salon and called it A Studio in the Tabignolles; pretty dreary and academic it is too, but it shows the men of genius in an interesting light. [...] There is Manet, terrible child of the 1860s, painting the potrait of a chum, while pals and admirers clutter up his studio in a way, I’m sure, he never tolerated. Renoir is there, looking conservative.. [...] Zola, too, burning but respectable… [...] Only Monet peers from the canvas like a mournful ghost, like a displaced soul—a poor little grocer’s boy, dwarfed by the swagger of the rest, dreaming of water lilies.

They look so serious. So important. There are no women in this picture (unless you count the plaster statue of Athene, old Wisdom herself, standing diminutively on the table, Muse to these sober young men) because no woman can ever look as serious as a man in a dark grey suit. To include the frills of a woman’s dress would undermine the significance of the men, it would cast a ray of frivolous sunshine across their thoughtful brows. So, if there were any women battling with contemporary realism or the study of colour and its impact on the eye, they couldn’t be included in this canvas. The high-minded mood would shiver and evaporate and be replaced by the ordinary levity of a social occasion. Fantin-Latour was right to exclude us, we would have fucked up his tableau.

~ by Sonia on October 7, 2008.