Meryle Secrest
Page 1
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2011 by Meryle Secrest Beveridge
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Secrest, Meryle.
Modigliani : a life / by Meryle Secrest.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Borzoi book.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59547-8
1. Modigliani, Amedeo, 1884–1920. 2. Painters—Italy—Biography.
I. Modigliani, Amedeo, 1884–1920. II. Title.
ND623.M67S43 2011
759.5—dc22
[B]
2010045357
Front-of-jacket photograph of Amedeo Modigliani, c. 1906, by Marc Vaux. Collection Dolly van Dongen, © Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou, fonds Marc Vaux. Snark / Art Resource, NY
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson
v3.1_r1
Modigliani, c. 1916 (image credit fm.1)
for Tom
For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone sees the invisible.
—RICHARD OF SAINT-VICTOR (d. 1173)
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1 · The Problem
CHAPTER 2 · The Clues
CHAPTER 3 · “Dedo”
CHAPTER 4 · The Blood-Red Banner
CHAPTER 5 · The Perfect Line
CHAPTER 6 · La Vie de Bohème
CHAPTER 7 · The Serpent’s Skin
CHAPTER 8 · “What I Am Searching For”
CHAPTER 9 · Maldoror
CHAPTER 10 · Beatrice
CHAPTER 11 · “A Stony Silence”
CHAPTER 12 · “Nenette”
CHAPTER 13 · “Life Is a Gift”
CHAPTER 14 · The Cult of the Secret
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Photographic Credits
Additional Images
Other Books by This Author
ILLUSTRATIONS
fm.1 [Frontispiece] Modigliani, c. 1916
1.1 Chester Dale, c. 1930
1.2 Maud Dale, 1927
1.3 Gérard Philipe in the title role of Modigliani of Montparnasse, 1958
2.1 The historians Julie Martin and Billy Klüver in Venice, 1988
2.2 Flaminio Modigliani as a young man, no date
2.3 The house in via Roma where Modigliani was born in 1884
3.1 Eugénie and Flaminio Modigliani just before Amedeo Modigliani’s birth, 1884
3.2 Dedo with his nurse
3.3 An undated photograph of Uncle Amédée Garsin
3.4 Amedeo Modigliani, Giovanni Fattori of the Macchiaoli school of Italian painting, and his wife
3.5 The via Vittorio Emanuele
3.6 The port of Livorno
3.7 A school play
3.8 Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani, 1900
4.1 Giovanni Fattori, no date
4.2 The photograph thought to be of Dedo found in G. E. Modigliani’s archive
4.3 Portrait of himself wearing a sailor suit by Amedeo Modigliani
4.4 Modigliani at work in a studio in Livorno, 1899
4.5 Katherine Mansfield, 1918
5.1 Modigliani, c. 1905
5.2 Modigliani, Paris, c. 1906
5.3 Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, 1906
5.4 The Bois de Boulogne, 1905
6.1 Cabaret du Lapin Agile
6.2 A typical evening at the Lapin Agile
6.3 The Bateau Lavoir, Montmartre
6.4 The rue des Saules, Montmartre
6.5 Chez Rosalie
6.6 Rosalie
6.7 Colette Comoy-Alexandre, Sceaux, outside Paris
6.8 Noël Alexandre, a son of Paul Alexandre, Modigliani’s first patron
6.9 The young doctor Paul Alexandre, 1909
6.10 A theatrical evening at the rue du Delta
6.11 The villa on the rue du Delta, 1913
6.12 Modigliani’s study in watercolor of Maud Abrantes
6.13 Brancusi, 1905
7.1 Paul Alexandre’s younger brother Jean
7.2 One of Modigliani’s early experiments in sculpture
7.3 A preparatory sketch for The Cellist, 1910
7.4 Anna Akhmatova, 1910
7.5 A period view of the Luxembourg Gardens
8.1 Modigliani’s studio at the Cité Falguière
8.2 The popular terrace of the Rotonde, 1919–20
8.3 Francis Carco, Michel Georges-Michel, and André Salmon, the bar of the Dôme
8.4 The center of Montparnasse, the Carrefour Vavin, 1905
8.5 Paris under water after the great flood, 1910
8.6 “Le Douanier” Rousseau, 1890
8.7 The painting of Jean Cocteau by Modigliani
8.8 Maurice Utrillo, Susan Valadon, and his stepfather, André Utter, 1920s
8.9 Soutine
8.10 A recent view of the gated entrance to La Ruche
8.11 Soutine, with his dealer, Léopold Zborowski, early 1920s
8.12 Léopold Survage, 1935
8.13 Modigliani’s watercolor of A Table-turning, or, Portrait of a Medium, 1905–06
9.1 Modigliani posing with one of his sculptures, 1914
9.2 Ossip Zadkine posing with his work, 1929
9.3 Picasso on the Place Ravignan, 1904
9.4 Lucien Lefebvre-Foinet on the rue Vavin
9.5 Modigliani, center, at the Dôme with Adolphe Basler, during World War I
9.6 Guillaume Chéron, one of Modigliani’s dealers, 1915
9.7 Paul Guillaume, 1915
10.1 Modigliani, about the time he met Beatrice Hastings
10.2 Beatrice Hastings at the turn of the century
10.3 Having a drink with the troops during World War I
10.4 Beatrice Hastings, 1918
10.5 Modigliani’s portrait of Diego Rivera, 1914
10.6 A sketch by Marevna of Rivera, Modigliani, and the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, during World War I
10.7 Marie Vassilieff’s café for artists during World War I
10.8 Madame Pompadour, 1915
10.9 Moïse Kisling and his wife Renée with Conrad Moricand, 1920
10.10 One of a series of photographs taken by Jean Cocteau, 1916
10.11 Pierrot, 1915
11.1 The bombardment of Paris, 1918
11.2 The sculptor Léon Indenbaum, 1915
11.3 Jacques Lipchitz and his wife in Paris, c. 1920
11.4 Lunia Czechowska, 1917
11.5 Beatrice Hastings, 1924
11.6 Beatrice Hastings in later years
11.7 Vassilieff’s sketch of the night she gave a party for Braque and Modigliani appeared uninvited
12.1 Modigliani’s art dealer, Léopold Zborowski, 1918
12.2 Berthe Weill’s provocative poster for Modigliani’s first one-man show at her gallery, 1917
12.3 Modigliani in Cannes in 1918, with Zborowski behind him, and his host, Osterlind
12.4 Modigliani on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice
13.1 The English artist-critic Roger Fry, c. 1925
13.2 Paulette Jourdain
13.3 The young Swedish girl Thora Klincköwstrom, 1919
13.4 Modigliani’s portrait of Thora, 1919
13.5 Th
e last photograph of Modigliani, 1919
13.6 The rue Jacob, Paris, Hôpital de la Charité
13.7 The portrait of the Greek composer Mario Varvogli
13.8 The death mask
13.9 Typical of a fancy funeral of the period like the one which was accorded Modigliani
14.1 The baby Jeanne in her Victorian perambulator, aged about fifteen months
14.2 A French newspaper photograph of G. E. Modigliani fleeing with Turati, chief of the Italian Socialist Party, 1926
14.3 Eugénie Modigliani at Carlsbad, c. 1925
14.4 Jeanne Modigliani in Paris aged thirty-five, 1953
14.5 G. E. Modigliani in America, 1935
14.6 A rare photograph of Valdi and Jeanne together, postwar
14.7 The British artist John Myatt
14.8 The art historian and museum director Marc Restellini
14.9 Jeanne Modigliani, not long before her death in 1984
bm.1 The studio apartment on the rue de la Grande Chaumière
bm.2 The derelict apartment on the rue de la Grande Chaumière before being renovated in 2007 by Godefroy Jarzaguet
bm.3 Modigliani, 1909
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MODIGLIANI INTRODUCED US. When I began work on this project late in 2005 I started making plans to visit Paris and came across the name of Marc Restellini. He had been the director of a major exhibition on that artist, “L’Ange au Visage Grave,” at the Musée du Luxembourg in 2002. The show brought together one hundred of Modigliani’s works—a quarter of his total output, some never before seen in France—and was an enormous success, attracting 600,000 visitors.
Most French museums are government run and supported, and of the private museums, none was founded by an art historian. To universal astonishment, Restellini followed up this triumph by opening a museum of his own, the Pinacothèque de Paris, a year later; his first exhibition was the late work of Picasso owned by his wife Jacqueline. That was another succès fou. By the time I arrived in Paris Restellini was organizing new Modigliani exhibitions and writing a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s oeuvre. He was also planning to move his museum from its spacious but impractical quarters in the former Baccarat museum on the rue du Paradis to a more prominent location on the Place de la Madeleine. Obviously, I should see him.
I finally tracked him down to the boulevard Saint-Germain, where he then maintained an office and, two floors above, had an apartment with his wife, Isabelle Corbier, a lawyer, and their son Hadrien. I was ushered into a living room with an ornate fireplace and boiseries and Louis XVI furniture, which also contained a modernistic, off-white, curved sofa, the kind of eclectic juxtapositions that seemed a propos once I met the owner. He is tall, was in his early forties, and was wearing blue jeans and an open-neck, immaculately tailored shirt, his enviable high coloring in contrast to a shock of unruly black hair through which he periodically ran his hands. If he was occasionally noncommittal his eyes signaled a great deal: interest, amusement, disinterest, but also warmth. In my case his welcoming and friendly manner were in marked contrast to the frigid response, or lack of any, that I had received from other sources. Specialists seemed to guard their own fields jealously or, as I had discovered with a former study of Dalí, expected to be paid. Restellini, on the other hand, was open and accessible. He wore his erudition with ease and that, as was immediately evident, was considerable, from his detailed knowledge of Modigliani’s works to his revisionist views about the artist’s personality, art, and life.
Restellini is the youngest of three sons of a Catholic physician of Italian origin and a French Jewish mother, and grew up in Saint-Omer. Isaac Antcher, his grandfather on his mother’s side, was a painter, and several of his rather somber works hung in the Restellini-Corbier apartment, including one of what seemed to be a small boy and his mother on a bridge. Antcher had been a client of Modigliani’s dealer, Léopold Zborowski. So when Restellini entered the Sorbonne to study art history it was suggested that he specialize in the School of Paris. He wrote his master’s thesis on Zborowski and, after graduating, began to lecture at the Sorbonne. It soon became apparent that he had a special gift for dreaming up exhibitions and the imagination and persistence to bring them about. Still in his twenties, he launched exhibitions on such painters and sculptors as Derain, Renoir, Soutine, Rodin, Boudin, Rouault, Monet, and Sisley, among others, with a special emphasis on Modigliani.
Restellini has authored over sixty shows in Europe and South America, with twenty in Japan alone. Since his museum opened at its new location in 2007, he has presented exhibitions on Lichtenstein, Soutine, Rouault, Man Ray, Jackson Pollock, and the Chinese warriors of Tsien, and was preparing exhibitions on Valadon and Utrillo, Morandi, Guardi, and Canaletto. His long-delayed catalogue raisonné is set for publication in 2011.
Restellini is the kind of art historian who can enlighten one about Mondrian, explain the Shamanistic Symbolism in a Pollock drip painting, or expose the hidden joke in a Modigliani portrait with a wave of his large and capable hands. Although he has specialized in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art he is equally at home with modern American masters and the Baroque—his phone answering machine plays an extract from Vivaldi’s “Stabat Mater.” In common with the late British art historian Kenneth Clark, whom he resembles in personality and interests, he has the gift of inspiring others with his own enthusiasms and opening eyes to wider worlds. The need for better education in the arts is, like Clark’s, one of his major concerns. He travels constantly and is capable of flying out at short notice, whether to Moscow or Osaka. His powers of persuasion among collectors are legendary; he says the most difficult part of his work is raising loans from banks. His career has brought admiration and, in the small and contentious world of French art, some tart comments. But whether phenomenon or enfant terrible, Restellini by most accounts has become the leading authority on the work of Amedeo Modigliani.
Restellini soon convinced me that the story of Modigliani’s life had been distorted out of all recognition after his death by the French literary world and that these inventions and gross omissions, the “legend,” had become fact through endless repetition. He said I should bend every effort to uncover the truth. At first we envisioned writing a biography together but had to give up the idea as impractical. Still, he would help me. Almost his first act was to introduce me to a pivotal figure, Luc Prunet, the great-nephew of Jeanne Hébuterne, Modigliani’s last love, who committed suicide within days of his death in 1920. This event, Restellini thought, had done most to fix in people’s minds the idea of a dissolute Bohemian, doomed to destroy everything and everyone he touched, the “Modi” who was “Maudit,” or accursed. And for some eighty years Jeanne Hébuterne’s parents and older brother André had repulsed all efforts to explain why their daughter had been driven to take her own life. But her brother had recently died. Prunet, a lawyer and André Hébuterne’s grandson, had inherited a sizable collection of his great-aunt’s paintings, drawings, photographs, and other memorabilia. He and Restellini were organizing an exhibition in Tokyo that opened in the spring of 2007. Prunet was most gracious and helpful, and he and his wife Nathalie were the soul of hospitality on my numerous visits to their town of Meaux, outside Paris. I cannot thank them enough. The resulting catalog of the exhibition, “Le Couple Tragique,” is illuminated by Restellini’s close study of the final six months of Modigliani’s life and is a revelation.
Sadly, biographers have to face the fact that what seems eminently accurate and fair to him or her does not always appear that way to the family of the person in question. After seeing passages from this manuscript, Luc Prunet took strong exception to the portrait of his great-aunt that is presented.
However, he did not respond to repeated offers by the author to consider removing specific paragraphs.
Instead Prunet has said he will take legal action if illustrative material of any kind (i.e., photographs, drawings, and paintings) from the Hébuterne archive appear in this b
ook.
As a matter of record, photographs of Hébuterne and her work have been published in art museum catalogs, biographies, and essays for over fifty years, notably in the Pierre Sichel biography of 1967. They appear in another major study, Kiki’s Paris, by Julie Martin and Billy Klüver, of 1989; Patrice Chaplin’s biography of Jeanne Hébuterne, Into the Darkness Laughing, of 1990; and four art museum catalogs published between 2000 and 2007.
The entries contained in Amedeo Modigliani: L’Angelo dal Volto Severo to accompany an exhibit of the same name at the Palazzo Reale, Milan, in 2003, are particularly voluminous and revealing.
Photographs of Hébuterne’s drawings and paintings are easily retrievable via a Google name search and an entry in Wikipedia. Hopefully, the reader’s curiosity will lead him to these universally available sources. In deference to Luc Prunet’s wishes, no photographs of Jeanne Hébuterne, her work or family members appear in this book.
Through Marc Restellini I also made contact with Noël Alexandre. He is one of the surviving children of Dr. Paul Alexandre, Modigliani’s first patron and collector. Noël Alexandre’s catalog for the Royal Academy of Art, London, exhibition “The Unknown Modigliani,” in 1994, is equally revelatory, not just for its documentation of the Alexandre collection of Modigliani’s works, but for its insights into Modigliani’s life and personality. I was invited to lunch more than once at the pretty country house in Sceaux by Noël Alexandre and his wife, Colette Comoy-Alexandre, and came away with convincing evidence of the man behind the legend.
Thanks to Restellini I was also introduced to Gerard Netter, son of another major collector, and dined with François Berthier, who is at work on a life of Roger Dutilleul, another businessman and early enthusiast of Modigliani’s work. I was given an introduction to Restellini’s lifelong friend and mentor, the late Philippe Cazeau, art dealer and Modigliani specialist, who received me kindly and gave me some early pointers about how to spot Modigliani fakes.
Between the two of us Restellini and I tracked down the young couple living in the once derelict apartment in Montparnasse where Modigliani lay dying. Restellini will knock on anyone’s door, and he and I were determined to see the apartment in which Jeanne Hébuterne’s family had lived. We ended up making two or three tries, partly because I shrink from what are termed, I believe, cold calls. We also saw however, exhibitions together. We conducted interviews, laughed, and argued. He has been the best friend a biographer could ever wish for. I could not have written this book without him.