The response Modigliani’s work had aroused in me was hardly unique. In the years immediately following his death in 1920, a few dealers, critics, and collectors were determined to educate a more or less indifferent public. Maud Dale saw to it that her husband Chester would become the largest single collector of Modigliani’s work and wrote a monograph. So did Giovanni Scheiwiller, a critic and dealer, whose connections with Modigliani’s family began soon after his death. Paul Guillaume, one of his two dealers, wrote an appreciation, and others, among them Jean Cocteau, Adolphe Basler, and Louis Latourette, began to publish their own accounts.
In 1926 André Salmon, poet and journalist, published a seeming celebration of Modigliani’s art that made frequent references to the artist’s apparent addiction to drugs and alcohol. The same stories were repeated in Artist Quarter by Charles Douglas (the pen name of Lawrence Goldring and Charles Beadle), published in London in 1941. Biographers were divided between those who saw him as a true pioneer of modern art or, as with Gauguin, van Gogh, and Soutine, the prototype of an artist at odds with society. He was a visionary, a poet and philosopher, even a mystic. Or he was a minor character, whose romantic life story had led some to place more importance on his work than it deserved. His nickname was Modi, which Salmon was the first to transmute into “maudit,” i.e., accursed. This unrelenting view painted him as morally defective, one of those pathetic figures who disintegrate before one’s eyes. Biographies, films, and plays following World War II were variations on the label that had firmly attached itself: “maudit,” accursed.
Modigliani, the youngest of four children from an educated but impoverished Italian Jewish family, came to Paris in 1906 at the age of twenty-two to make his fortune. Polite, well mannered, intellectual, he soon abandoned the conventional attire of the young bourgeois for the uniform of the Bohemian. Arthur Pfannstiel, writing in 1929, called him “this young Tuscan, this great lyricist, at once draughtsman, sculptor, painter.” He was strikingly good-looking. “How beautiful he was, my God, how beautiful!” Aicha, one of his models, said. He was ardent, impetuous, and not very careful. At least three illegitimate children are likely and stories were told of a courteous, charming personality who became ugly when drunk, took off his clothes, picked fights, and, it was said, threw one of his mistresses through a window. He alienated and dismissed would-be collectors; he was his own worst enemy. Cocteau wrote, “There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful; alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.” The more he struggled, the more desperate he became. Kenneth Silver wrote, “The little Jew from Livorno becomes a good-for-nothing.”
Modigliani’s difficulties were not only confined to poverty and finding a dealer. Romaine Brooks, whose milieu was the high intelligentsia, received full and flowery mention for her first one-man show, whereas Modigliani had no reviews at all for his in 1917, and few mentions in the French press during his lifetime. But she was rich, he was poor, and art reviewers were notorious for expecting to be paid.
Modigliani, aged thirty-five, died in agony and supposedly starving. His lover, Jeanne Hébuterne, then eight months pregnant, committed suicide barely two days later. His death was bad enough, but hers was almost Greek in its tragic dimension. They left behind a two-year-old girl. They were star-crossed lovers whose brief, haunted lives seemed made to order for the “vie romancées” and “vie imaginaires” so popular in the 1920s. Such fictionalized works were vastly preferable to the prosaic reality, Salmon wrote in Modigliani, sa vie et son oeuvre (1926) and expanded upon relentlessly for decades. In his biography of Beatrice Hastings, Simon Gray observes that Salmon’s frequently quoted La Vie passionnée de Modigliani, written thirty years later, in 1957, is actually a novel but was abridged and reprinted as fact in 1961 under the title Modigliani: A Memoir. Those who were witness to events were appalled at the exaggerations, distortions, and imaginary dialogues that appear in Salmon’s books about Modigliani. Pierre Sichel, a highly respected biographer who published his own account in 1967 when many of Modigliani’s contemporaries were still alive, wrote of La Vie passionnée de Modigliani, “In this book Salmon … devotes well over ten pages to long, imaginary conversations that Modigliani, Ardengo Soffici, and Giovanni Papini had in Venice,” and describes in minute detail the visit of the three to the Uffizi Gallery. Soffici subsequently wrote, “What my friend André Salmon has written concerning the relationship between myself, my friend Papini, and Modigliani contains so many inaccuracies that I must attribute it to failing memory.”
Other authors were not so kind. Jean-Paul Crespelle, author of Modigliani: Les Femmes, les amis, l’oeuvre, of 1969, wrote, “One marvels that the energy he directed at evoking, in so many books, the figure and work of Modigliani has led him to accumulate inexactitudes and inventions. Can one attribute to a failing memory his assertion that Emanuele Modigliani conducted the funeral service … when, as a socialist deputy in the Italian Chamber … he was prevented from visiting Paris until a month later …? Everyone knew this to be true and a simple check would have prevented Salmon from making a monumental error of this kind.… Examples of similar inexactitudes and a total indifference to the truth are numerous. Without any doubt André Salmon, who lived for many years in Apollinaire’s circle, believed, like the poet, that ‘the truth held no interest.’ ”
All this could be easily explained, according to Lunia Czechowska, friend of Modigliani’s final years and subject of many of his portraits. She wrote, “Modi and Salmon detested each other. They refused to say a word to each other. Salmon was contemptuous of this ‘drunken tramp’ and never went to Zborowski’s to see his paintings.” Salmon’s view of the “peintre maudit,” the “dear wounded prince,” has influenced everything written about him since; it fitted too well into popular notions of art as synonymous with eccentricity and even derangement.
But perhaps the most destructive of the falsifications surrounding Modigliani’s life was the French film Montparnasse 19, shown in the U.S. as Modigliani of Montparnasse in 1958. It was based on a novel, Les Montparnos, by another shameless teller of tall tales, Michel Georges-Michel. Gérard Philipe, a classically trained actor, versatile, charming, and boyishly handsome, seemed an ideal choice for the leading role, and the fact that he shortly afterward died, at the same age as Modigliani, lent the portrait a pathos no one could have anticipated. But, Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times, the film’s proposition was “that its hero is a lush, sad-eyed, tormented garret dweller who is inexplicably bored and finds bleak comfort with a rich mistress … the victim of idiots and ghouls.” The inevitable death scene, Crowther wrote, “leads one to suspect the scriptwriters … were more impressed by the commercial irony of the artist’s misfortune than by his personal tragedy.” Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet who had a love affair with Modigliani, was another witness to events who was appalled by the distortions. The film was “extremely vulgar,” and her comment: “It is so bitter!”
Trying to sell his drawings: Gérard Philipe in the title role of Modigliani of Montparnasse, 1958 (image credit 1.3)
The characterization gave further weight to “an art historical mindset that survives to the present day,” Maurice Berger wrote. A demonstration of his point appeared in a London review of the exhibition “Modigliani and His Models” at the Royal Academy in the summer of 2006. The art critic for the Guardian, Adrian Searle, wrote, “Drunken, ranting and stoned on one thing or another—add hash, coke, ether and opium to the alcohol—Modigliani, the archetypal accursed artist” was someone he could not like and who only irritated him. No wonder, Silver wrote, Modigliani was “probably the most mythologized modern artist since van Gogh.”
No one seems to have noticed that the fact that Modigliani was alive at all was something of a miracle. From childhood he had been beset by illnesses and two were life-threatening, and all this before he reached the age of seventeen. It was as if he, along with others in his family, were the survivors of some great catastrophe. Even biogr
aphers like Pierre Sichel, who tried to repair the damage caused by the casual distortions of Salmon, Carco, Georges-Michel, and others, and who knew about Modigliani’s lifelong battle with tuberculosis, hardly mention it and seem oblivious to the toll it exacted: physical, emotional, and social. June Rose, another biographer who attempted to separate the reality from the inventions, did not find the illness significant. Neither did Jeanne Modigliani, who wrote his biography, Modigliani: Man and Myth (1958), and barely mentioned the disease that killed him.
As I knew, a biography can never be absolutely, objectively true, “definitive,” as it used to be called. “The reflection cast back by any good biography resembles one of those compound faces made by newspapers for the amusement of their readers, blending perhaps an artist’s eyes and forehead with a criminal’s nose and mouth,” Julian Symons wrote. “The features in a biography are all distinct enough, and they are recognizably the features of the subject: but the haunted eyes and the hunting nose, the wafer-thin mouth and rocky chin, are the biographer’s own.”
What I also knew was, as W. B. Yeats wrote, “There is some Myth for every man which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all that he did and thought.” If it were possible to understand something of the trials Modigliani underwent in the struggle to create and the role his art played in the fulfillment of an ideal, then the enquiry would be worthwhile. As Yeats also observed, “The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.”
CHAPTER 2
The Clues
The gods of hazard lead us down
The backstairs of the universe
Dancing to fiddlestrings accurst
We go as other men have gone.
—GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
“La Chanson du mal-aimé”
A. J. A. SYMONS, who wrote a biography of a forgotten figure, an English writer who called himself “Baron Corvo,” published his work in 1934. This experimental study, The Quest for Corvo, is still considered a model for authors seeking to penetrate an accepted image to uncover the actual human being behind a façade. In Corvo’s case the disguise was self-invented. In Modigliani’s case it came about almost immediately, with the clear goal of capitalizing on the tragic circumstances of his life and almost simultaneous deaths of himself and his mistress in 1920. Symons wrote of Corvo, “[H]ere was indeed a tragic comedy, more sombre and fantastic than I had expected or hoped…Frustration and poverty had been the condition of his early years as of his last; tutorships, odd jobs, and charity were the actual lot of the dreamer who (in his dreams) had ruled the world.” The comparison seemed exact, even the summing-up of Corvo’s life by another observer: “A self-tortured and defeated soul, who might have done much, had he been born in the proper era or surroundings.”
The historians Julie Martin and Billy Klüver in Venice, 1988 (image credit 2.1)
And yet. Was this really an accurate picture of the life I was studying? For all the graphic descriptions of Modigliani’s life and death, could this withstand the evidence of the works he had accomplished in his short career, particularly the masterful paintings—portraits and nudes—created in the final period of his life, more than one a week? The physical stamina alone needed to keep up with this pace, combined with the rigor, economy, elegance, and confidence of those final works, showed a man at the height of his powers. And in fact such evidence, along with his paintings, sculptures, a few scrawled notes, and photographs, was more to be trusted than the firsthand accounts that emerged in the years after his death. Ernest Hemingway, who did not always follow his own advice, once instructed other writers that what was needed was “a built-in, shock-proof shit-detector.” This was hard enough to do when the witness was alive, almost impossible once everyone involved was long dead. In Modigliani’s case, almost ninety years had passed.
Besides evaluating some wild stories of debauchery and deflowering one needed to discover the direct heirs, who sometimes had archives that had been kept private or overlooked. Then there were the research libraries, the heirs of friends, collectors, artists, and dealers, as well as experts in the circle of artists to which Modigliani belonged in the early years of the twentieth century. Here was a man who once rubbed shoulders with Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Robert Desnos, Moïse Kisling, Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, Maurice Utrillo, and so many others, all living near the crossroads of the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail on the Left Bank of Paris.
Among a group of scholars I was to meet, Julie Martin and Billy Klüver stood out as the éminences grises, considered with a respect bordering on awe for their encyclopedic knowledge and ability to pinpoint galaxies of complicated interrelationships among the artists, sculptors, poets, writers, and musicians in Paris in the early years. Their book, Kiki’s Paris (1989), is an invaluable reference and a compendium of letters, photographs, poems, and anecdotes, amassed over a decade. I immediately contacted Julie Martin. (Billy Klüver has since died.) We agreed that the accepted view of Modigliani was no longer defensible but that nothing had replaced it so far. We both believed he was a remarkable man who had been dismissed as a clownish figure who just happened to have painted some unforgettable canvases. He was a remnant of another age, “the last Bohemian,” even a lost soul who had committed slow suicide with alcohol. There had to be a reevaluation, and one was long overdue. She immediately pointed me toward some important contacts: first, the expert Marc Restellini; then Kenneth Wayne, who had curated another important exhibition about Modigliani; Moïse Kisling’s son Jean; the art historian Colette Giraudon; Noël Alexandre, son of Modigliani’s earliest collector; even a former chief of police in Paris.
Then Julie Martin suggested that I investigate a series of interviews conducted in 1963–64, when so many of the people around Modigliani were still alive. The interviews were commissioned by the American author Pierre Sichel for his biography of Modigliani. By the time he decided to write about Modigliani, Sichel had already written a novel based on the life of Lillie Langtry, The Jersey Lily, which was a best seller, and another about a Vermont poet, The Sapbucket Genius, that was loosely modeled on a life of Dylan Thomas.
Sichel originally planned to approach Modigliani’s life in a similar vein. But then, thanks to an extraordinary series of interviews conducted by John Olliver, his bilingual investigator in Paris, Sichel changed his mind and wrote a biography instead. It took him five years. After publication, Sichel placed his huge manuscript on deposit at the Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, where he also deposited the interviews. This immediately interested me. I had often had the experience of consulting the identical sources as other authors and discovering overlooked possibilities, not to mention arriving at quite different conclusions. I at once set about getting copies.
Julie Martin also started me on the path of uncovering another treasure trove: “L’Histoire de notre famille,” by Modigliani’s mother, Eugénie Garsin-Modigliani. This account of her own and her husband’s families, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century and continuing until Modigliani’s birth in 1884, had long been known but presumably discounted. Jeanne Modigliani, whose own biography of her father, Modigliani: Man and Myth, was an attempt to uncover the truth, had access to the document. However, her excessively careful, almost bloodless, narrative makes very little use of it. There could be an explanation. Far from being the prosaic account one might expect, Eugénie’s descriptions of people, places, and events have a lively and irreverent immediacy, perhaps the reason why her writings were so heavily edited. She is opinionated, unexpected, shrewd, and frank. In a confident, rhythmical hand, she sets down her observations about family members, describing their idiosyncrasies and shortcomings with the verve of a born novelist. No better observer could have been found to describe the particular influences at work on the complex personality of her son.
Eugénie’s history begins with a description of the Garsins, Sephardic Jews who had lived on the Mediterranean coastline for centuries. One ancestor, based in Tunis, became an au
thority on sacred texts, which, according to Leo Rosten, he probably wrote in Arabic. He also founded a school of Talmudic studies. Eugénie and her son claimed to be descended from the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who had fled from Spain during the Inquisition. It was true that there was a Regina Spinoza in the family and she was certainly Spanish because, according to Jeanne Modigliani, her daughters spoke the dialect of the Spanish Jews. Jeanne added that, since Spinoza was childless, they could not be direct descendants. But to judge from the way the Garsins insisted on their connection and their scholarly studies of the philosopher’s writings, that they were somehow linked by family ties seems likely.
This was a family much more apt to take pride in intellectual prowess than financial dealings, although at the beginning of the nineteenth century the Garsins had opened a business in Livorno (Leghorn). As Sephardim they were heirs to a train of thought which had dominated Jewish culture from about 600 AD until Jews were expelled from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. Sephardic Judaism, Leo Rosten wrote in The Joys of Yiddish, was “an exceptionally sophisticated blend of Talmudic thought, Greek philosophy, Aristotelianism, science and the ideas of Averroes, the great Islamic scholar.” Unlike Ashkenazic Jews, who settled in central and eastern Europe and spoke Yiddish, the Sephardim spoke Ladino, were educated and cultured, and rose to positions of eminence in Spain, Portugal, and North Africa as doctors, philosophers, poets, royal advisors, and financiers. The Garsins were no exception. Jeanne Modigliani wrote that besides Spinoza, the family’s heroes were Uriel da Costa and Moses Mendelssohn. That philosopher, grandfather of the composer Felix, was one of the leading lights in the Haskalah, or Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century movement which aimed to bring Judaism out of its self-imposed isolation into Western thought, and which emphasized assimilation. The Garsins, worldly, scholarly, fluent in languages, exemplified Mendelssohn’s ideal as they moved with ease between cultures and social groups. These businessmen bought houses and kept servants, although the source of their income is not described in either Eugénie’s or Jeanne’s accounts. June Rose, who wrote a biography of Modigliani and interviewed his brother Umberto, believed that they ran a credit agency, with offices in Livorno, Marseille, Tunis, and London.
Meryle Secrest Page 3
