Utrillo's Duty

Exempt from duty: . . . Original paintings in oil, mineral, water, or other colors, pastels, original drawings and sketches in pen, ink, pencil or water colors. . . .

So reads Paragraph 1,807 of U. S. Public Law No. 361, the Tariff Act of 1930. Its legalistic loophole: the word "original." Last week it appeared that Manhattan customs officials had squeezed certain of the grey-and-chalk Paris street scenes of Maurice Utrillo through the loophole, ruling that they were copies of postcards, therefore commercial rather than original art, therefore dutiable at 15% of the price they fetched in France. Duty was applied specifically on one importation of Manhattan's Perls (pronounced perils) Galleries, Rue Saint-Vincent a Montmartre; and on a score imported by the Valentine Galleries for a show which opened this week. Both galleries paid and appealed.

What saddened the two victims of the ruling was that they had to pay duty on the paintings not as reproductions of postcards, worth approximately two cents each, but as fashionable paintings, worth from $200 to $2,000 each. What saddened dealers, critics (including the Museum of Modern Art's President Anson Conger Goodyear and Director Alfred H. Barr Jr.) and artists in general was the ruling's implication: that an artist's model rather than his method determines whether his work is original or not.

Utrillo partisans could not deny that he often uses postcards as departing points for paintings of Paris street scenes which he knows well. But they could think of other Utrillo inspirations besides postcards. Among the earliest were lumps of sugar soaked in absinthe which his mother tossed him when he was ten to shut him up. By the age of 15 he was drawing steady inspiration from gin and whiskey bottles. By the '305 he had moved on to lamp fuel, mentholated alcohol, petroleum, benzine, eau de cologne, ether, with opium and hashish on the side. In 1936 London's great Tate Gallery publicly and prematurely proclaimed him dead of drink. Utriilo was not dead and he was no longer drunk; he was still prodding his imagination (by praying instead of drinking) and painting pictures. In any case, admirers last week remembered incidents which went to show that his imagination needed no prodding, and that no postcard would stay a postcard under his brush. For instance:

He once decided to paint Kiki, Queen of the Paris models, favorite of Artists Pascin, Kisling, Soutine. After meticulously arranging her pose and drapes, sitting at his easel, squinting at her, measuring her with his thumb, dabbing at his canvas so laboriously and long that Kiki was sure he had painted a good likeness, he declared his work done. Kiki ran around and looked at it. He had painted a great, bleak barn. "Perhaps," says catlike, sleek, sophisticated Kiki, "perhaps it was my farm-girl appearance."

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