Meryle Secrest

by Modigliani: A Life

  Modigliani could have had the first, the collapse of one of his lungs. His brother Emanuele made the offhand comment that Dedo only had “one and a half lungs,” and patients in The Magic Mountain who underwent the ordeal were known as the “Half-Lung Club.” If such a cure had been attempted and Dedo’s condition worsened this might explain why the account of his crisis is so unrevealing. No one in the family would want a bad decision recorded. All we know is that, as an adult, he was terrified of doctors. We know that his fellow students died and that he survived.

  Since everything hinged on the strength of the patient’s immune system we can assume that Modigliani’s was unusually resilient despite his frequent illnesses and the typhoid that had also almost killed him just two years before. Once on the road to recovery Dedo needed months of convalescence. To Europeans that had come to mean the mountain air of the Alps or the breezes blowing in from the Mediterranean. In the U.S., there was the same difference of opinion. One went north in search of pristine air that would not only clear the lungs but toughen up the invalid. Alternatively, one went south in search of gentle winds that would not irritate an already weakened constitution; you chose, depending on your views about how much further stress a consumptive patient needed. For Eugénie, there was no contest. It was the Mediterranean coast, but then there was the cost of an extended stay. Again, Amédée came to the rescue. As it happened he had been busy building his latest venture in Marseille, the Compagnie pour l’Exploitation de Madagascar, and for the moment there was money rolling in. He wrote back, “Consider your son as mine. I shall cover whatever costs you consider necessary.”

  As soon as Dedo could travel they set off for Naples and from there to Torre del Greco, spending the autumn and winter months beside the sea in a vast, almost empty hotel, the Santa Teresa. One can assume that, as Dedo slowly began to mend, he slept sitting up for weeks, if not months. One can also assume that his temperature was taken several times a day to keep track of the fevers that would abate in the morning and reappear every evening, with their unpleasant night sweats and disorientations, if not delirium. Wherever the patient was, the emphasis would be on absolute rest accompanied by nourishing food and plenty of it. In The Magic Mountain, Mann has given us a vivid portrait of life as an invalid in a Swiss sanatorium, as the day took its unvarying course. “When he had finished [eating] he would sit there propped up against his pillows, his empty dishes … before him, and gaze out into the quickly falling dusk—today’s dusk, which was hardly distinguishable from yesterday’s, or the dusk of the day before yesterday, or of a week ago. There was evening—and there had just been morning. The day, chopped into little pieces by all these synthetic diversions, had in fact crumbled in his hands, and turned to dust—and he would notice it now … It seemed to him that he was simply gazing ‘on and on.’ ”

  After such a serious attack some people were never able to return to normal life. By contrast, Modigliani’s infection—with luck, tuberculosis went into a lengthy remission—declined relatively rapidly. One of the great factors was his mother’s selfless care. The other was the right diet. The third may well have been psychological; Uncle Amédée had thoughtfully provided a studio as well. He began sketching again remarkably soon. Then he was well enough to paint and models were provided; an old beggar was a particular favorite. He started visiting museums, always accompanied by his mother, who slept in the same room. He was gaining weight and, as he entered his seventeenth year, began to grow a light, curly beard.

  Modigliani’s actual instruction in technique ended relatively soon but museums were his constant inspiration. Margherita describes how he would sit transfixed for hours before an unfinished canvas by Leonardo da Vinci analyzing every stroke, from background to lightly sketched foreground figures. He was fascinated by the antique bronzes he saw at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, with its collections of Greek and Roman sculpture, and visited the churches of Santa Chiara, San Domenico, and San Lorenzo. Margherita’s account refers to her brother’s “haughty air” and “rather cold manners,” but this comment has to be taken with caution, given her attitude toward her brother. Others describe him differently, as having a certain aristocratic bearing that seemed instinctive, rather than an effort to assert social status. As for his manners, these could belong to a boy who was still shy and ill at ease with strangers. Perhaps he no longer blushed when spoken to, but he had not yet developed the easy friendliness that was to become marked. Once drawn into conversation he lived up to his sobriquet of “the Professor.” Margherita is probably right in thinking most people assumed him to be much older than he really was. He was certainly looked on as an artist with a future. “You must paint with intuition, imagination and concentration,” an English tourist told him. This, Modigliani replied, was exactly what he intended to do.

  The process by which Modigliani evolved from a gravely ill adolescent to someone committed to his talent and future as an artist is closed to us. We may guess at the pain and terror he endured as he was struck down by these terrible illnesses. We may guess at his agonizing recovery and what feelings he must have had for the mother who had used all her powers to keep him alive. There is considerable evidence that the experience of almost dying can have a life-altering, if not transfiguring effect. The American writer Katherine Anne Porter, who contracted tuberculosis during World War I and almost died in the Spanish influenza of 1918, is a case in point. She used the experience twenty years later in a story which forms the title piece for her collection of three short novels: Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939). The reference is to a horse she rode when she was growing up on a farm in the American South. In her story, the horse comes to symbolize death.

  Porter said later that the illness changed her forever. “It just simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, ready … I had what the Christians call the ‘beatific vision,’ and the Greeks called the ‘happy day,’ the happy vision just before death. Now if you have had that, and survived it … you are no longer like other people, and there’s no use deceiving yourself that you are.”

  One cannot know what Modigliani experienced or to what extent he shared Porter’s “beatific vision.” He certainly seemed infused with a new sense of purpose and almost giddy at the inner transformation. The evidence is contained in the letters he wrote to Oscar Ghiglia, the classmate eight years his senior who was already making a name for himself as an artist. Ghiglia was the one Margherita believed had started Dedo on the path of drink, drugs, and loose women. Whether or not this is true, it is clear that Oscar was Modigliani’s confidant, they were dedicated to art, believed in a life after death, and studied arcane symbolism that would find its way into Modigliani’s later work. Ghiglia had taken courses in the self-portrait with Fattori in Florence and was beginning to have early success in the genre that would become so important to his friend. Ghiglia’s method was to shut himself up in a room in Florence, painting himself in front of a mirror. He had a particular composition in mind, of himself seated, with brushes and palette in hand. The result, Allo specchio (At the Mirror), was shown to another of their classmates, Llewelyn Lloyd, who was so impressed that he entered the painting in the Venice Biennale. Allo specchio had been accepted in the spring of 1901 and the news had just reached Modigliani, who was convalescing on Capri.

  He was there for the cure, Modigliani wrote without explanation—perhaps they both knew what that meant. He had painted nothing for four months but he was accumulating material just the same. He wanted to move to Florence and start work, “that is, to dedicate myself faithfully (body and soul) to the organization and development of every impression, of every germ of an idea that I have collected in this place as if in a mystic garden.”

  In his next letter, Modigliani expanded on his pleasure in Capri. He wrote, “Would you believe that I have changed in traveling here? Capri, whose name alone is enough to arouse a tumult of beautifu
l images and ancient voluptuousness in my spirit, appears to me now as essentially a springlike place.” Once they were in Rome, he was even more enchanted. “Rome … is not only outside of me, but inside of me as I talk. Rome which lies like a setting of terrifying jewels on its seven hills, like seven imperious ideas. Rome is the orchestration with which I surround myself, the limited area in which I isolate myself and concentrate all my thoughts. Its feverish delights, its tragic landscape, its beautiful and harmonious forms—all these things are mine through my thought and my work.” Exactly what were the truths of art and life? These were the ideas he was trying to come to grips with and had found them “scattered among the beauties of Rome.” By that Modigliani evidently meant not only the monuments, buildings, and scenery, but the thrilling discoveries he was making in the museums and churches, the Borghese, the Palazzo Doria, the Terme, the Sistine Chapel, and so many more. “I will try to reveal and rearrange their composition—I might almost say their metaphysical architecture—to create my own truth on life, on beauty, and on art.”

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

  But to be young was very heaven!

  —William Wordsworth

  His sense of giddy optimism pervades the letters, almost an exultation. He added, “I would like my life to be a fertile stream flowing joyfully over the ground.” It was tempered by the very real possibility that he did not have long to live, and a numb acceptance of what seemed inevitable: “I am myself the plaything of strong forces that are born and die in me.” This was not too far removed from the sentiment expressed in Shakespeare’s King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport.” Perhaps he felt, as Edvard Munch did after a similar attack, lying flat on his back in bed, his hands outside the sheets, “Now I could never be as before. I looked at my brothers & sisters, and I envied them.” Munch asked himself, “Why me?”

  Little by little the idea seems to have taken hold that he was marked for some special fate. Like Frank Lloyd Wright a few years later, Modigliani was clearly influenced by Nietzsche’s theories about the emergence of the Übermensch. The artist, as Superman, was divinely endowed, therefore divinely inspired, for as Nietzsche also wrote, the artist had his own truth, or a special kind of truth. “He fights for the higher dignity and significance of man; in truth, he does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions of his art: the fantastic, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense for the symbolic … the faith in some miraculous element in the genius.”

  As for Wright, after experiencing public censure for abandoning his wife and six children to live with a married woman, he wrote, “The ordinary man cannot live without rules to guide his conduct. It is infinitely more difficult to live without rules, but that is what the really honest, sincere, thinking man is compelled to do. And I think when a man … has given concrete evidence of his ability to see and to feel the higher and better things of life, we ought to go slow in deciding he has acted badly.”

  Modigliani could have written that himself. In fact, he wrote something very much like it to Oscar Ghiglia almost a decade before Wright’s letter. “People like us … have different rights, different values than do normal, ordinary people because we have different needs which put us—it has to be said and you must believe it—above their moral standards.” As for Wright’s defiant conclusion: “I am a wild bird—and must stay free,” that would have struck Modigliani as completely logical and reasonable. “Do what you feel …” The artist who is really serious about his work must “push his intelligence to its maximum creative power.” There was a battle ahead, one he must be prepared to undertake, “facing the risks, carrying on the war with … great strength and vision.” He must be prepared to suffer every hardship and “bring forth the most supreme efforts of the soul” in the cause of satisfying beauty’s “painful demands.” In his mind, fatalism and idealism, creativity and death, seemed intertwined.

  The mold was set when Modigliani was seventeen.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Perfect Line

  …and hence through life

  Chasing chance-started friendships.

  —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE,

  “To the Rev. George Coleridge”

  CHILDREN WHO BEGIN as adorable cherubs sometimes have a disconcerting way of losing their looks, their first flowering of physical glory having been their last. Dedo began as perfection: pouting mouth, wide dark eyes, strongly marked brows, and straight nose, and never deviated from that classical pattern. Pictures of the young Modigliani illustrate the mysterious progression by which infant features can metamorphose into a masculine handsomeness without losing one iota of their allure: wider cheekbones, stronger, straighter nose, eloquently large eyes, and full lips. Perhaps because of his devastating illnesses, Modigliani remained what we would call short, five foot three, which was considered an average height for his generation and not regrettable, as it is now. He retained ideal proportions and during his brief career as a sculptor attained a powerful physique.

  To say that he was loved by women is an almost laughable understatement. All his life, almost before one affair was over, another began. Perhaps he was also loved by men but there is no evidence of this. As soon as he was studying with Micheli this seemingly shy and delicate boy was turning the conversation to girls. Bruno Miniati, who later became a photographer, said Dedo used to make admiring comments about Micheli’s maid, a pale little girl with eyes as black as coal. To another classmate he said one day, referring to the same girl, “Wouldn’t you like to find a button in your pants because of her?” Still, he would not stay with the others when their walks took them to the via dei Lavatoi or the via del Sassetto, where the brothels were. “Dedo would always turn back. He was ashamed.” Somewhat later, it is said, it was a point of pride for Modigliani to talk about how many brothels he had visited.

  The painter Ludwig Meidner recalled, “I think it was in Geneva that a wealthy German woman, who was traveling with her young daughter, invited him to accompany them and Modigliani was quite happy to accept this offer. He had just come from home, and was at that stage immaculately dressed, a lively, good-looking young man of twenty-two years of age who subsequently paid less attention to the … mother than to her youthful daughter. It greatly amused him to flirt with the daughter without the mother noticing, and he never got tired of telling us about it.”

  He had, the art critic Adolphe Basler wrote admiringly, “that masculine handsomeness which one admires in Bellini’s pictures.” The blushing shyness, now replaced with calm confidence, demonstrated a polish that would again have reminded his mother of her dead father, along with his characteristic elegance and refinement. Thanks to the continuing generosity of Uncle Amédée, Modigliani at this stage enjoyed all the privileges of a young man of good family who does not need to work for a living, and his dress showed it. It was refined without being showy, while calculated for maximum effect. “A public man, the dandy, an actor on the urban stage, hid his individuality behind the protective mask of appearance, which he strove to make undecipherable,” Michelle Perrot wrote. “He was fond of illusion and disguise and exquisitely sensitive to detail, to such accessories as gloves, ties, canes, scarves and hats.”

  What is significant about this observation is the link the author makes between status, costume, and the instinct to perform. Barzini wrote of the Italian male, “Watch him promenade down the corso of any small town at sunset, or on Sunday morning after mass. How cocky he looks, how close fitting are his clothes, how triumphantly he sweeps his eyes about, how condescendingly he glances at pretty girls from the corner of his lowered eyelids! He is visibly the master of creation.” Barzini might have said, but did not, that no one assumed the role with more enthusiasm than one of the poets Modigliani most admired. Gabriele d’Annunzio was equally small and, once his youthful looks had departed, pockmarked and ugly, but women continued to fall at his feet. He had presence, the actor’s gift of entering a room. He had charm, he
was a shameless flatterer, and he knew the importance of dressing for the part: first as a curly-locked adolescent poet, then a young man-about-town, then a successful dramatist, the World War I aviator, and, finally, a national hero, marching on Fiume to claim it for Italy in 1919. D’Annunzio cleverly attired his conquering band of fighters in uniform brown shirts, a flourish that was not lost on Mussolini, who merely changed the color, so that his soldiers marched in black ones. D’Annunzio and Modigliani—both wonderfully gifted, idealists to their toes, utterly dedicated as artists—were illusionists, hiding behind a façade. It is difficult to say who became the better master of that art.

  Recovered from his brush with death: a prosperous Modigliani, c. 1905 (image credit 5.1)

  By the spring of 1901 Modigliani and his mother were back in Livorno after an absence of six months.

  At seventeen, Modigliani was at an age when most young men nowadays are still living at home. But in his generation, with its short average life span—by 1913, that had become forty-eight for men and fifty-two for women—and when working-class boys in Britain left school at the age of twelve, seventeen would have been considered adulthood. Going home to live with mother did not suit him at all. Within days he had persuaded her to let him undertake formal studies in Florence. Ever agreeable, Uncle Amédée paid his expenses and Modigliani left Livorno. Ghiglia was in Florence, still studying with Fattori, and they presumably shared a studio. On May 7, 1901, Modigliani began taking life studies in the Scuola Libera del Nudo. He moved to Rome for the winter, returning to Florence early in 1902, presumably to rejoin Ghiglia. Not much is known about these first months of independence but we do know that on his return he contracted scarlet fever. Before the arrivals of penicillin and sulfadiazine this infection by haemolytic streptococci was considered more dangerous than measles and capable of causing serious complications. Scarlet fever, now fortunately rare, began with a fever, a sore throat, and a headache, followed by the arrival of small red spots, redder and more numerous than measles, hence the name. After these disappeared the skin was covered with a powdery substance that made it look as if it had been dusted with meal, and often peeled away. The neck was tender to the touch and the glands were swollen. Upon hearing the news Eugénie again rushed to Dedo’s side. Vomiting, rapid pulse, delirium—these were a few of the possible complications. But this time symptoms were relatively mild and, Margherita records, her brother recovered “without any complications.” Another convalescence followed, this time in the Austrian Alps, and Dedo’s health was again restored.