Meryle Secrest

by Modigliani: A Life

  Modigliani was looking for studio space, and after finding it nearby he came and went like a member of the household. Paul Alexandre wrote, “Modigliani charmed everybody immediately. He trusted any stranger we might introduce to him, and was completely open, with no pretences, inhibitions or reserve. There was something proud in his attitude and he had a good firm handshake. Modigliani was more than an aristocrat, ‘une noblesse excedée’ [‘surpassingly noble’], to use an expression of Baudelaire’s which fits him perfectly.”

  Modigliani became Alexandre’s latest cause. The latter introduced him to everyone and began commissioning portraits. Alexandre wrote, “He already had a deep-rooted confidence in his own worth. He knew that he was an innovator rather than a follower, but he had not as yet received a single commission.” Alexandre’s first project was a portrait of his elegant, reserved father. As was his custom Modigliani made a number of delicate sketches before trusting himself to paint a portrait of Jean-Baptiste Alexandre, seated, in black, with a high collar, in tones of bluish charcoal, grayed-off greens, and pinkish maroons. The old man confronts the viewer with grave distinction, his white beard precisely trimmed to reveal a pink bottom lip, his eyes tired but calm. He has a natural authority and so does his son, who strikingly resembles him. In one of several paintings by Modigliani Paul Alexandre is standing against the same background. His hand is on his hip, there is the same-shaped face, the same steady, unsmiling look, the same air of reserve. There is no hint here of the admirable qualities of both men: a high-minded, idealistic view of life and a spontaneous benevolence. In Paul Alexandre, young as he was, Modigliani had found someone with an eighteenth-century concept of the patron who recognizes, and nurtures, a rara avis. He was twenty-six; Modigliani was twenty-three.

  Modigliani’s study in watercolor of Maud Abrantes (image credit 6.12)

  They became inseparable. As long as the drawing show of Cézanne’s work was still at Bernheim’s they returned day after day. Alexandre wrote, “I remember an anecdote about his visual memory, which was extraordinary: once, to my great astonishment, he drew from memory and at a single attempt Cézanne’s ‘Boy with a Red Waistcoat.’ ” At Vollard’s gallery in the rue Laffitte they studied a series of Picasso’s Blue Period paintings. At Kahnweiler’s in the rue Vignon Modigliani was transfixed by an unobtrusive watercolor of Picasso’s that, curiously, represented a young fir tree, turning green, encased in blocks of ice. When they went to visit Henri (Le Douanier) Rousseau, who died shortly thereafter (1910), Modigliani drew Alexandre’s attention to one painting, The Wedding (1904–05), in which a family group, transfixed as if posing for a camera, stands expressionless under a bower of trees. Whether assessing Nadelmann’s bronzes or the work of a young unknown, Modigliani gave it the same concentrated study and generous praise. There was “no trace of envy or disparagement,” even if the owners did not return the compliment.

  As Picasso’s fir tree in ice would suggest, Modigliani, with his actor’s instincts, was fascinated by the boundary line between fantasy and reality. Unexpected juxtapositions and intense visual sensations interested him in particular. They used to go to the old Gaité-Rochechouart, which had mirrored walls, meaning that, if one sat in the right seats, the performance at center stage would be split into a million tiny reflections. Modigliani was just as dazzled by the circus, which presented so many unexpected possibilities: clowns with gaping mouths, acrobats dangling and twisting from wires, harlequins with grinning faces and, in particular, Columbines, a series of lovely brazen women wearing skirts and not much else. Modigliani was famously dissatisfied with his drawings. Alexandre observed that when an image attracted him he would work on it with demonic speed, drawing it over and over again. The line had to begin in just the right way and continue with the right assurance and verve. “This is what gives his most beautiful drawings their purity and extraordinary freshness.” Anything less than perfection would be tossed on the floor. This is where Alexandre made, perhaps, his ultimate gift to posterity: he picked them up.

  One of the drawings in the collection, curiously, not given to her but to Paul Alexandre, was of Maud Abrantes writing in bed. Her classical, almost Roman profile is revealed as she concentrates on a letter, which is barely indicated. The drawing is concerned with her intensity of focus and the expressive curve of her shoulder as she bends over her task. Paul Alexandre cautiously sketches in his own bare outline: she sat for Modigliani, came regularly to the rue du Delta for about a year, and drew when she felt like it. She returned to New York in November 1908. There is one postcard from her to Alexandre, written in French on the ocean liner La Lorraine. It says simply, “Are you still reading Mallarmé? I couldn’t tell you how much I miss all those charming evenings we all spent together around your warm fire. Oh what a wonderful time!” She was pregnant. Alexandre wrote, “We never saw her again.”

  Several biographers have asserted that Alexandre acted as Modigliani’s doctor. His son Noël denies this. There was no reason for any medical attention; Modigliani’s tuberculosis was in complete remission and he was seldom ill. The other assertion, popularly made, that he either became an alcoholic on arrival in Paris or already was one, was also not true. Numerous witnesses, Soffici and Ludwig Meidner among them, make it clear that he only drank in moderation. Charles-Albert Cingria, a writer, said, “Certainly he drank … but no more nor less than others at that time.” Latourette said that he liked Vouvray or Asti, but in moderation. Noël Alexandre said, “You know when one is poor and the work is hard, a glass of wine is just the thing. It is nourishing and gives you back your strength. It’s what poor people do.”

  As for drugs Modigliani experimented with hashish along with everyone else. Once while under its influence he drew a series of marionettes, so-called, formally posed figures reminiscent of Rousseau’s The Wedding, in which the participants have become so abstracted they look like statues. The crowd in the Delta also liked the idea and experimented with it. However, Modigliani seldom drew while taking hashish, preferring to recall his visions in sobriety with the aim of reproducing the heightened effect. Sometimes the borderline between sobriety and intoxication was blurred. Alexandre remembered the night when they were on their way back to Montmartre in the Métro and a train burst onto their station platform. “It was as if an amazing orchestra with millions of extraordinarily powerful cymbals had swept in like a whirlwind.” There are, from time to time, references to a small amount of cocaine that Modigliani was said to have carried. Again, this was an age when drugs were in general use, treated like snuff and used accordingly.

  Brancusi, 1905 (image credit 6.13)

  The person who did need Alexandre’s professional help was another close friend, Constantin Brancusi. This sculptor, now considered “one of the most original, persuasive and influential sculptors in the history of art,” was that rarity, an authentic genius from a peasant family, minimally schooled, unintellectual, and intuitive. He began by learning the traditional methods of working in wood in his native Romania and showed such promise that he was awarded a scholarship to the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest. At the end of his studies, his goal was Paris. He actually walked most of the way, via Vienna, Munich, Zurich, and Basel, working as a farm laborer in exchange for a meal or a bed for the night in a barn. He arrived in Paris in 1905 when he was twenty-nine and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, then began to exhibit at the Salon d’Automne.

  Brancusi never lived at the rue du Delta but he and Alexandre would walk in the woods at Clamart, talking constantly about art. In contrast to the Cubists, who wanted to break up and rearrange the visual image, Brancusi believed with Nicolas Boileau, a seventeenth-century French poet and critic, that “rien n’est beau que le vrai”—nothing is beautiful but the true. His whole effort was “to preserve the integrity of the original visual experience,” Herbert Read wrote, and to reduce the object to its essentials. One of his first successful sculptures, The Kiss (1908), directly carved from a single block of sandstone
, was passion reduced to its essentials, the unity of two locked in a single embrace. Read wrote, “The egg became, as it were, the formal archetype of organic life, and in carving a human head, or a bird, or a fish, Brancusi strove to find the irreducible organic form, the shape that signified the subject’s mode of being, its essential reality.” Searching for the reality behind appearances: this, in Modigliani’s case, was wedded to his belief in art as a magical force offering the path to exorcism and transfiguration. “Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose.” Brancusi and Modigliani were destined to be friends.

  Brancusi had taken a studio in the Cité Falguière, rue de Vaugirard, a ramshackle huddle of artists’ studios that had, as its few compensations, some north-facing windows. He was scraping together a living in restaurant kitchens, perhaps as a plongeur, that miserable existence described by George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London. Brancusi, who looked, Anaïs Nin wrote, “like a Russian muzhik” with his Santa Claus beard, found work unloading at the docks, polishing floors, and doing other manual labor. According to Latourette Modigliani occasionally found part-time work making photographic prints and retouching paintings. Alexandre denied that Modigliani ever did any kind of work. “He was a born aristocrat. He had the style and all the tastes. It was one of the paradoxes in his life: loving wealth, luxury, fine clothes, generosity, he lived in poverty if not misery. It was just that he had an exclusive passion for his art.”

  One suspects that the notion that because he was so brilliant others should support him became a conviction. If so it was a viewpoint Alexandre supported by giving him special treatment. The only work on display at the rue du Delta was Modigliani’s—no one else’s, and obviously resented. It led to a fierce argument during which Modigliani broke some sculptures by Drouard and Coustillier. Alexandre is probably right in thinking Modigliani had “a taste for danger,” as splendidly exemplified by Uncle Amédée. In common with Frank Lloyd Wright, a crisis seemed to be regarded as a personal test; it almost seemed a necessity. Speaking of such special personalities, Anthony Sampson wrote in The Changing Anatomy of Britain, “[T]hey have to feel they’ve got their backs to the wall to perform properly. If they make a lot of money they have to get rid of it, like gamblers, so they’re at risk again.” Such an explanation would, to some extent, account for the reckless ease with which money flowed through Modigliani’s fingers, his courting of dangers within and without, his self-defeating behaviors, and his ability to endure.

  There was another reason. Modigliani’s attitude, rare nowadays, was perfectly acceptable in his day, almost commonplace. In Bohemian Paris, Jerrold Seigel writes that the poet Chatterton, who died in poverty, and whose life was celebrated in Alfred de Vigny’s play of the same name, had lost status at a time when trade and the profit motive had supplanted all other values. In a former age artists might never be rich, but they could count upon the patronage of the church or the aristocracy and were honored and valued. Now art had become a commodity, to be sold for whatever the market could bear, and the artist a sort of tradesman with no special claim to respect or status.

  Nevertheless, the belief that art was still a noble cause, in stark contrast to the grubby, money-focused goals of the bourgeoisie, went to the heart of the Bohemian creed. Ordinary men and women, destined to spend their lives in numbly repetitive work, looked at the Bohemian and saw a man frittering his life away in idleness, indulging in drugs, drink, and loose women. From the other side the view was equally uncompromising. Any artist who put himself up for sale was prostituting his talent and had lost his soul. Most people could not possibly understand what inner demons drove the artist toward heights he would, perhaps, never attain. The fact that he was not bound by bourgeois standards of love and morality meant nothing. The artist’s standards for himself were higher, on a more elevated plane. He was the true hero of the age in La Dernière Aldini, by George Sand, a novel loosely based on the career of her son-in-law, the sculptor Clesinger. As it turned out she had chosen a particularly bad example in this profligate personality whose derelictions included abandoning his wife. Never mind. An artist could not be judged, since his allegiance was to a larger cause. Balzac wrote, “Bohemia has nothing and lives from what it has. Hope is its religion, faith in itself its code, charity is all it has for a budget.”

  At the rue du Delta on New Year’s Eve of 1908 they had prepared for a big party for weeks. The house had been decorated by Doucet. A barrel of wine, of some nondescript vintage, was hauled in and there was all kinds of food as well. There was also hashish, which, as Dr. Paul Alexandre recalled, took the evening quite out of the ordinary. He remembered seeing Utter dancing, his blond hair flying, and he could have sworn that flames were flickering around his head. He also recalled seeing Jan Marchand stretched out on a sofa. His arms were wide open and he was moaning and weeping. Someone had told him that, because of his beard, he looked like Christ on the cross. Having had too much hashish, he believed it. Modigliani, Alexandre added as if that went without saying, dominated the evening.

  It did not seem to matter to Modigliani that he was hounded by debts, sleeping on the run, with no money for food and no buyers for his drawings. He was surviving somehow. Occasionally he curled up in the street, as his friends discovered one morning. He had found a cosy corner underneath a table on the terrace of the Lapin Agile and was dead to the world. Perhaps he shared the feelings of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska when he was launched on his real work at last. The sculptor wrote from Paris in 1910, “I am right now in the midst of Bohemia, a queer mystic group, but happy enough; there are days when you have nothing to eat, but life is so full of the unexpected that I love it.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The Serpent’s Skin

  The morning is wiser than the evening.

  —RUSSIAN PROVERB

  DURING THOSE EARLY YEARS in Paris Modigliani’s ability to find friends who made it their mission in life to care for him was, as ever, unparalleled. It was a testament to the appeal of his personality but also the persuasiveness of his convictions and the sense that here was an important artist. This made it possible for him to subsist on the margins in Paris even though (incidentally) it did nothing to curtail his ability to empty his pockets. He had not yet found a dealer or sold his work on the open market. One day he would; it was only a matter of time. Meanwhile there was always a fire at the rue du Delta, there was a meal and a glass of wine, and, when all else failed, there was a bed with the mice and rats in Rosalie’s kitchen.

  Just how seriously Paul Alexandre in particular took his self-imposed role is a case in point. Early in 1909 he left for Vienna, where he planned to spend a year conducting research in his specialty, dermatology. But he was not going to leave before asking his brother Jean to “keep an eye” on Modigliani, meaning, make sure he was eating. Jean, two years Modigliani’s junior, then studying to be a pharmacist, was living at home and working part-time. The assumption that Jean would take over the care of someone older than himself was probably accepted good-naturedly. But Jean lacked his brother’s rueful awareness that, with Modigliani, whatever could go wrong, would. Shortly after Paul’s departure, Jean wrote to say “I let three or four days go by without going to his studio. On the fifth day I found my Modi in desperate straits, three sous in his pocket and nothing in his stomach. I could just imagine the rest, so I lent him 20 francs.”

  Paul Alexandre’s younger brother Jean, who was destined for an early death (image credit 7.1)

  That spring of 1909 they saw each other often. They went boating on the Marne and Jean often treated “my Modi” to an evening at the theatre. They went to the Odéon to see Marivaux’s Fausses Confidences, whose psychological subtleties appealed to the artist. The other play on the bill, a medieval drama by Calderón, much admired by Jean, left Modigliani cold.

  There were almost daily visits to exhibitions, trips to the Salon des Indépendants, an exhibition of their friend Le Fauconnier’s in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Durand-Ruel’s, where there was
a spectacular exhibition of Renoirs, to Brancusi’s studio and much else. Jean, who was working part-time and studying the rest, could not understand why Modigliani “trailed around” so many galleries, neglecting his work. If only he would stop wasting his time and pull himself together—this was an underlying theme of the two or three lengthy letters of Jean’s that have survived. Jean referred to the “instability you were aware of before you left,” a tantalizing reference that is not explained. He was becoming irritated by Modi’s ability to make money disappear and then embarking on “the usual credit system” at his paint supplier’s and restaurants. He would then appear at Jean’s door with empty pockets, and Jean, after all, only had his weekly wage.

  How simple it would be if Modi could be persuaded to work! Jean knew plenty of artists who managed. Henri Gazan, habitué of the Delta, had a standing agreement to create drawings for the influential magazine Gil Blas and other “neighborhood rags,” which helped with the monthly bills. Jean knew the editor of L’Assiette au Beurre, an illustrated weekly magazine of political satire that employed several artists to provide caricatures accompanied by pithy and amusing descriptions. It seemed logical to introduce the two men. But, Jean wrote, “I don’t need to tell you that Modi, faced with the prospect of having to submit his drawings, never wants to go back there.” The issue had been settled long before. As Modigliani wrote to Ghiglia, “Your real duty is to save your dream.”