Meryle Secrest

by Modigliani: A Life

  Flaminio Modigliani as a young man, no date (image credit 2.2)

  She had met her future fiancé when he dined with them in Marseille but he had made little impression on her, even though he was slim, dark, and already wealthy as a young mining engineer. In 1870 Flaminio, thirteen years her senior, was comanager of his family’s mine in Sardinia as well as twelve thousand hectares (almost thirty thousand acres) of land with vast tracts of timber. In those days he spent most of the year in Sardinia, overseeing mining operations and also becoming something of an expert in forestry and farming. He is thought to have helped found a school for peasants, showing an interest in education that he would share with his future wife. Their official engagement took place with so little fanfare that nobody bothered to tell Eugénie. It was a business arrangement. Eugénie wrote, “I didn’t have enough character to rebel and not enough knowledge of the world to know what I was getting into. Where would I have gained the idea that I could revolt?”

  She and Flaminio were married in January 1872. She writes, “Our married life began as drab and lifeless and stayed that way … I can honestly say that my husband did not exist for me.” She saw him for ten days every Easter and fifteen days every summer; for the remainder of the year she lived alone. “He did not understand me any more than I understood him. I wrote to him, as I did everything else, because it was expected of me, and my letters had to be sent unsealed to my mother-in-law for approval before they could be mailed.” She resorted to the kinds of generalities one would write to a stranger. “I continued to be treated as a girl even after I had my first child.” It is hardly surprising that she did not welcome motherhood. She continued, “[I]t took years for me to become the passionately involved mother I did finally become. My spirit and character developed bit by bit with no help from my environment. Those early days seemed to pass in a period of moral and intellectual stupor.”

  Her firstborn, Emanuele, arrived in the winter of 1872 and Reginetta visited her grandchild three or four days later. Eugénie had not seen her mother since the wedding, when she was in good health. She was horrified to discover that Reginetta, who had nursed a young maid ill with tuberculosis, had herself become infected. Her decline was rapid. “She was firm, without illusions,” Eugénie wrote. They both knew she was dying. “[My mother] saw Emanuele for an instant and put her delicate white hand briefly on his head, knowing that she could not embrace him.” Then she left. “I was in absolute despair, one made all the more agonizing because I could not go to see her.”

  Part of the problem, Eugénie wrote, was that her mother had always enjoyed good health and, when she began to feel ill, ignored the symptoms. Eventually they had to be taken seriously, and at this point their wonderful Nanette took over, the one who could cure anything. She administered one of her mysterious and magical potions. It had an immediate and drastic effect on Reginetta’s digestive system. The daily “cure” went on for months with no result except to make the patient much sicker. Finally Uncle Félix stepped in and insisted Reginetta enter a hospital for all that medical science could offer. This consisted of such treatments as blistering, cauterizations, and other assaults on the body which further weakened the invalid. Eugénie never saw her mother again. She died a few months later, in May 1873. Eugénie was eighteen and her mother, in her early forties.

  Another kind of epidemic, one Eugénie did not describe in such detail, afflicted this gifted, cultured family. Reginetta’s illness and death was taking place as the Garsin family was experiencing one of its periodic financial crises. Mismanagement (probably embezzlement) sent the London branch into bankruptcy; the family member involved promptly disappeared. The branch in Tunis was also compromised, and so was the Marseille business. The only branch not in a state of collapse just then appeared to be in Livorno.

  One often sees in this family a curious and perhaps predictable link between crises, financial or otherwise, affecting the security of the group, and emotional as well as physical illness. In Papa’s case the news arrived in the middle of Reginetta’s illness and descended on him with hurricane force. He became wildly agitated and so irrational other family members thought he had gone mad. An unmarried sister, Laure, suffered from what was called “a persecution complex” and was hospitalized. Margherita, who also never married (later becoming a second mother to Jeanne Modigliani), was opinionated and biased and, according to one account, equally unbalanced. Umberto, Amedeo’s brother, appeared to have suffered from depression as an adult. Emanuele, the future Socialist leader, was one of the few members of this brilliant, troubled family to escape mental distress.

  The Garsin family was, of course, fiercely united. As Luigi Barzini wrote in his seminal study The Italians, the family was the first source of power, the only refuge in a life full of political upheaval, and the Garsins, with their tenuous alliances and fluctuating fortunes, felt the same imperative to close ranks. Eugénie’s “smala” was, she wrote, a beehive in which each person’s role was clearly ordained. “Every member is duty bound to do all he can for [the family’s] welfare,” Barzini wrote, “give his property if needed and sometimes, when it is absolutely inevitable, sacrifice his life.” In the Garsin household one of Eugénie’s sisters had done just that.

  It happened shortly after Eugénie’s marriage and Reginetta’s death. Several years passed before the Garsins were back on their feet financially. Évariste, sent to London in 1877, had made a promising start. After a period of idleness and uncertainty, Papa had regained his sanity and accepted an important job as manager of the Banque Transatlantique in Tripoli. But until that happened the Garsins had to struggle to make ends meet. Someone had to care for Amédée, Laure, Gabrielle, and Albert. The parenting role fell on Clémentine, then just twelve years old. She was not pretty, Eugénie wrote, but had a lovely smile and admirable dark eyes. They could not afford servants. Some hard physical work fell on Clémentine, who was frail, along with the severe emotional strain of dealing with her erratic and unstable father. She would be up until midnight overseeing Albert’s homework. Then, after a few hours of sleep, she had to be at work because Papa rose early and expected his morning coffee, not to mention a stream of cheerful chatter. “Oh the heroism of those early morning conversations!” Eugénie wrote. Taking care of Papa would become the focus of Clémentine’s short life. When he moved to Tripoli she went with him. She was there until she died at the age of twenty-four, overwhelmed by the emotional and physical demands. Eugénie gave her future son Amedeo the name of Clemente in her honor.

  In 1881 the Modiglianis’ zinc mining operations in Lombardy were considered the most important in the mining district outside Milan. This was the year that metals began a decline on the world markets. In 1882, the Modigliani brothers stopped mining. The price of metals continued to fall, and in 1883 they declared bankruptcy in Sardinia and were forced to begin looking for another buyer in Bergamo. The disaster came at a particularly difficult time. As was customary the Modiglianis had been marrying off their daughters with dowries calculated to the last decimal point to return the investment with interest. Olimpia, one of the daughters, had married Giacomo Lumbroso, wealthy son of a wealthy family. It was an advantageous match, and so the Modiglianis, including Flaminio, agreed to a hypothetical clause in the marriage contract pledging all their houses and possessions as guarantee for her dowry. In 1884 the house of Modigliani was put into liquidation. The Lumbrosos moved to enforce the marriage contract. By then Flaminio and Eugénie had three children: Giuseppe Emanuele, Margherita, and Umberto. She was pregnant again with her fourth child and about to give birth. Everything—house, furniture, china, glass, silverware—was now owned by the Lumbroso family. Eugénie was beside herself.

  Then the Modiglianis discovered an obscure Italian law that prevented the authorities from removing the bed on which a pregnant woman was about to give birth. One imagines the jewels, silver, clothes, laces, silks, curtains, bedspreads, blankets, linens, pillows, draperies, cushions, objets d’art, rugs, and mu
ch else piled upon the very large bed on which the mother-to-be presumably lay. The scene’s aspects are worthy of opera buffa: the wailing family, the bailiffs methodically removing chairs, tables, beds, armoires, sofa, lamps, and pictures; the grunting men, banging doors, clinging children, and a groaning woman on a bed in a rapidly emptying room. Less farcical is the precedent that this calamity set in motion: the plunge from wealth to want that would haunt the lives of Amedeo and his descendants from the day he was born.

  The house in via Roma where Modigliani was born in 1884. This later, undated photograph depicts the house in a state of decay. A plaque recording the fact of his birth is faintly visible between the second-floor windows. (image credit 2.3)

  Somehow they managed to keep an enormous kitchen table with a black marble top. Amedeo (“Beloved of God”) was born on it at 9:30 a.m. on July 12, 1884, before the doctor could arrive. As was customary he was circumcised by the mohel eight hours later and entered the world, in the Jewish calendar, in the year 5644. Eugénie wrote, “I celebrated his birth with tears and anguish.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “Dedo”

  I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar…

  —PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, “Adonais”

  JEANNE MODIGLIANI’S early memories of Livorno center around that huge, black, marble-topped table in the kitchen, where, in the first light of dawn, she drank her café au lait and reviewed her lessons before school. She remembers the dining room where, between the Benozzi Gozzoli reproductions, five fading drawings by her father wilted in the lamplight and where, on a fake Renaissance table, a copy of her father’s death mask was displayed on a black velvet cushion. She recalls the scrap of brown corduroy velvet, all that remained of her father’s jacket, now a humble shoe cloth. In family albums Jeanne appears as a fat-cheeked baby, wearing a frilly lace cap and a bib, soon after she had been taken in by her father’s family. Two or three years later she is seated on a balcony with her grandmother, her rounded features expressionless, her hair tightly plaited and bedecked with ribbons. Eugénie, now white-haired, sits beside her wearing a half-smile, her chin defiantly lifted.

  Eugénie and Flaminio Modigliani just before Amedeo Modigliani’s birth, 1884 (image credit 3.1)

  After the somber glory of the house at 38 via Roma, to move to modest quarters in a nearby street, the via delle Ville (now the via Gambini) was a distinct demotion. Eugénie dealt with it with her usual aplomb. The older she became, the more her rapidly expanding form pushed past whatever shackles convention had placed upon it. She might feel the humiliation intensely; she would never show it. Flaminio, however, was clearly devastated. His wife was almost used to the random malevolence of fate, which had visited so many calamities on her from no fault of her own. He, however, in this particular case had played a central role.

  In a photograph taken in 1884 at the height of the crisis and just before Amedeo’s birth, Eugénie is half-turned, away from the photographer; Flaminio’s face is blank, shoulders slumped. His disgrace was compounded by the fact that he had been one of the chief architects of the Lumbroso financial agreement. It was nobody’s fault exactly, but thanks to him his wife and children were penniless. Eugénie can be seen reaching across the gap between them to rest a conciliatory hand on his shoulder. Llewellyn Lloyd, who met Flaminio when Amedeo (called Dedo) was an art student, described him as “a fat little man who always wore a swallowtail coat and a bowler hat” and was very cultured, although how true this was seems in doubt. Some biographers thought that Eugénie and Flaminio eventually separated, although this is also a moot point. The letters of Giuseppe Emanuele—unlike Dedo, Eugénie’s oldest son was a voluminous correspondent—reveal that his father was a continuing presence, even if their mother remained the dominating influence in their lives. When Flaminio died, a year after Eugénie, with what seems to have been an advanced case of Alzheimer’s, Emanuele, searching for a generous summary of his father’s life, remarked that he “was tenacious at work and at doing his duty.” They could remember him as someone who always stood beside their mother, “her gruff, but faithful companion—a bit old-fashioned, but infinitely affectionate and deeply, passionately in love.”

  As they grew older Eugénie’s younger sisters, Laure and Gabrielle, also took up residence in the Modigliani household, not that Eugénie was particularly happy about two more mouths to feed. Like Clémentine, Eugénie also played the role of little mother, and her diary makes it clear she had never liked her sisters (or, at least, being made responsible for them). Laure appeared in 1875 and Eugénie had nothing good to say about her. “She was pale and thin, poorly developed and anemic; already a hopeless dreamer, locked up inside herself.” The word “hopeless” is instructive—Eugénie did not believe in this unpropitious cause. Here was the type of girl “without … any kind of inner goal, unsociable, solitary by nature and sickly.” Why had Laure not moved in with Clémentine in Tunisia? She might have turned out better.

  Nevertheless Laure stayed for three years, leaving just after Umberto’s birth in 1878, and was replaced by Gabrielle. That was not much of an improvement either. One of Flaminio’s relatives told Gabrielle bluntly, “They sent you here to get rid of you.” It was unkind but probably true. What happened in the intervening years is not recorded but by 1886, eight years later, both sisters were living with Eugénie and grudgingly tolerated. Laure was teaching French, so at least she was paying for her keep. Gabrielle was in charge of the household. “She is doing it well and since she’s had the job it seems to me she is happier, more serene and puts up with little annoyances better,” Eugénie wrote.

  Dedo with his nurse (image credit 3.2)

  Since Flaminio’s income had vanished Eugénie had transformed herself and her sisters into teachers of a language they all spoke with ease. Thanks to their social contacts they had attracted paying pupils. Meantime, the children were growing up. Emanuele, always called “Mené,” at thirteen and a half was in high school, serious-minded, intelligent, and doing well. Margherita, aged eleven, was paler and thinner than her mother would have liked, but also making progress. Umberto, gentle and affectionate, was eight years old and not particularly interested in his work. As for the two-year-old, Dedo, he was a ray of childish sunshine. “A bit spoiled, a bit wayward, but “joli comme un coeur,” she wrote. (As pretty as a heart.)

  “Joli comme un coeur”: the same had probably once been said of Papa, who had, like Laure and Gabrielle, arrived for dinner in 1886 and never left. Photographs of Eugénie’s father Isacco have not been found, but her description of him as a young man, very handsome, not particularly tall but well proportioned and with clear, expressive eyes, is instructive. His beautiful manners, elegant gestures, and air of effortless distinction, that of a natural aristocrat—all this would come to be said of his grandson Amedeo. Eugénie must have noted the same regular, even features, the same prettily marked eyebrows, the pouting, perfect mouth, and the shock of black hair. If Emanuele, with his wide, square face and stolid build, was born to favor the Modigliani side of the family, it must have been clear to Eugénie that Dedo was a Garsin, quick-witted, energetic, full of charm, small, and slim. No wonder he was already being spoiled.

  When written records are sparse the biographer is forced to fall back on whatever can be learned from photographs. The earliest has Amedeo, perhaps a year old, wearing only a shirt and no underpants, much less the diaper with which any self-respecting baby now greets the world. He is sitting in the lap of his nurse, who is wearing the traditional striped dress of her profession. Dedo has probably just come from his bath and looks with bewilderment on the world around him. No other photograph of the baby Dedo is available to us, but like many boys his appearance would have been feminized; boys wore the identical outfits of girls and their hair was not cut until they were three or four years old. They “played freely under their mother’s or servant’s skirts,” and, then as now, their toys would have been scattered everywhere. In Dedo’s case, having a nanny indicated a certai
n improvement in the family status, if not the platoons of servants once deemed essential for a Modigliani.

  It is clear from Eugénie’s diaries that her life had been transformed by the growing success of her teaching enterprise. Her little school was developing from language coaching into an actual establishment, employing other teachers and attracting children from ages five to about fifteen. As soon as he was old enough Dedo, too, was taking lessons, but at home. In Italy as in France, there were few schools for young children, and mothers routinely provided their early education. At age five Dedo could read and write and was probably bilingual as well—in years to come, his command of French would be much admired, and he always wrote to his mother in French. As for the atmosphere of the house, nothing has been written, but one guesses it was tolerant enough. If earlier generations accepted corporal punishment as a matter of course, in bourgeois families, “exchanges of affection between parents and children were tolerated and even desired … Caresses were considered appropriate in many circumstances, an encouragement to the development of young bodies,” Michelle Perrot wrote in A History of Private Life. The fact that the familiar “tu” was coming into use between parents and children, replacing the more formal “vous,” was another welcome development. Less emphasis was being placed on rote obedience and more on an enlightened awareness of the individual child’s needs.

  In a household run by women there were male figures to compensate for the lack of a strong paternal influence. The first was Rodolfo Mondolfi, a well-known teacher at a Livornese high school, who appears often in Eugénie’s diaries, helping the boys with their homework, advising her on how to deal with Laure, and, most of all, acting as confidant.