Paris is a city of the mind. In addition to its reputation for intellectualism, it is one of the few cities of which almost everyone has some mental picture. And even though these images sometimes prove to be romanticized, Paris is nevertheless indisputably picturesque.
Perhaps no painter better captured both the reality and romance of Paris than Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955), whose beautiful and unassuming works, now on display at the Yasuda Kasai Museum in Shinjuku, belie the tempestuous story of his life.
Widely regarded as the premier urban landscape artist of the 20th century, one of Utrillo's strengths was his "unintellectual" approach to art. His contemporaries wrestled with new "-isms" -- Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism -- and subscribed to the intellectualized concepts of the School of Paris, a wide-ranging cosmopolitan movement that dominated the French art scene in the early 20th century. Yet Utrillo was happy to paint prosaic but beautiful scenes, such as "L'Eglise de Saint-Medard a Paris" (1906), that reveal an unpretentious mastery of color and a reassuring solidity of composition.