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Maurice Utrillo, 66, still paints a few of the Montmartre scenes whose pale, subtle coloring and cool geometry of composition made his fame. But red-eyed, emaciated "Monsieur Maurice" no longer visits his old haunts; he sits at home in a suburban stucco villa, staring at his buxom energetic wife and dreaming of the dear, drunken, amazingly productive old days.
Marc Chagall, a wanderer at 60 as he has always been, recently moved to the south of France and resolved to take up ceramics. But he continues to paint lush, lyrical fireworks of color. Referring to the image of the floating man that continually recurs in his paintings, Chagall says: "The man, in the air used to be partially me. Now it's entirely me."
Fernand Léger looks hard as flint at 69, lives in a chaotically cluttered Montparnasse studio, and has 100 pupils—most of them ex-G.I.s. Léger's own Leisure seems half daguerreotype and half poster. It shows that he himself has come a long way from the brash, machine-tooled "Tubist" abstractions of his early days. He painted it during World War II, which he spent in Manhattan. "Because of the gasoline shortage," he recalls, "the city was suddenly teeming with bikes, and I was much impressed by the many attractive girls I saw pedaling around . . ."
Georges Rouault feels "very tired" at 79. He lives in seclusion outside of Paris, painting his molten, haunting illustrations of the New Testament. Dark though they generally are, Rouault's religious works depend on color to convey his intense emotion. Far more self-critical than most moderns, Rouault two years ago burned 315 old, unfinished works he had come to dislike.
Georges Braque, 68, collects and polishes old bones to embody in the ceramics he is making nowadays. Braque and Picasso were once Montmartre pals, painted almost indistinguishable cubist pictures. After the two parted, Braque stuck with cubism, gradually developed it into the tricky, fluid and elaborate medium of expression he employs today. In his spotless Paris studio, Craftsman Braque works at his complex, heavily textured canvases slowly and with obvious enjoyment. "The fun," he says, "is that when you begin a picture you never know what it's going to look like. Each new work is a journey into the unknown." The Terrace represented a twelve-month on & off cruise for Braque.
André Derain, too, is now working in ceramics. A big, heavy old man of 70, Derain lives in an 18th Century mansion outside of Paris, draws for two or three hours a day in the park surrounding his house. In his youth his art reflected first Matisse's use of brilliant colors, and later, cubism. Since then it has grown steadily more simple and calm. Derain's subjects and his manner of painting them are never startling, but their clarity and order hold the eye. "The great danger for art," he says, "lies in an excess of culture. The true artist is an uncultured man."