Art Offers Relief

"It gave one hope for less savage tomorrows."

From my translation of Gustave Coquiot’s book about the painter Maurice Utrillo:

I still remember — and how vividly! — the time, that happy time, when Utrillo worked only for me. Up there on the Butte, in the middle of the war, this strange monk shut up in his cell provided me with the only moments of relief I knew in the midst of all that hideous human carnage. Verdun, the mass graves, the deformed faces, all the blood, all the death, all the stench of the slaughterhouses, all the cries, all the horror of those lunatics who had been turned against each another by the butchers of Empire or Republic. When I contemplated a new painting by Utrillo, I forgot it all for a moment. The sight of a small white church, it gave one hope for less savage tomorrows. The war is finally over, crushed under the weight of so many corpses. What was the source of this brief feeling of respite? I do not want to analyze it too closely, for fear of regretting all the things which, if I had been born in a different age, I should have been able to share with others...

Maurice Utrillo, Church at Anet (c. 1916-18)