Meryle Secrest

by Modigliani: A Life

  Jean was aware that “my Modi” was already receiving support from his family in the form of commissions. There was the matter of a portrait Modigliani was painting of him. He had also been commissioned for a portrait of Jean’s aristocratic girlfriend, the Baroness Marguerite de Hasse de Villers, an accomplished horsewoman. Modigliani had begun work on both commissions, was making preparatory sketches, money had been advanced, and Jean, whose interests centered around his exams, Marguerite, the next Quat’z Arts ball, and not much else, could have been forgiven for thinking his caretaking duties had been discharged.

  When he visited the studio, Jean wrote in March 1909, Marguerite’s portrait had been sketched onto the canvas and looked as if it would make a wonderful composition. “As for my portrait, it would have been better if Modigliani didn’t attach such enormous importance to it. I had great difficulty in preventing him from chucking it on the fire … But I’m afraid he doesn’t use his time very well, and without counting the times he’s completely broke (like last week) when he can’t get anything done, there are others, like yesterday, when he spends the whole day out of doors.”

  Jean knew that a daily progress report on what Modigliani was painting was of intense interest to his brother. Paul had helped Modigliani prepare for the twenty-fourth Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1908. Modigliani showed a drawing, a study, Idol, two nudes, and a painting, The Jewess. This curious work shows a woman, naked from the waist up, who may or may not be wearing a hat, with a broken nose, coarse lips, and heavily lidded eyes. The composition is set down in pastel blues and outlined with crude brushstrokes in black, on the verge of caricature. Its title and the manner of its depiction would suggest that some self-loathing was involved. At any rate, it is entirely out of character with any portrait that comes before or afterward. If Modigliani had hoped to make a mark, as he had so calmly expected in the letter to his brother, he was disappointed. There was no review and nothing sold.

  The caricatural approach to character displayed by The Jewess is entirely absent from the portrait of Jean Alexandre, painted in 1909. The young student who, with his wide cheekbones, low forehead, full lips, and deeply set eyes, bears scant resemblance to his father and brother, sits facing the viewer. He supports his head against an arm, and his look is pensive. Although Modigliani struggled with the portrait the implication, from Jean Alexandre’s letters, is that the one of Marguerite, The Amazon, gave him even more trouble. Jean wrote, “The portrait seems to be coming along well, but I’m afraid it will probably change ten times again before it’s finished.” The sitter, obliged to pose for hours in the Cité Falguière studio, to which Modigliani had moved to join Brancusi, was becoming mutinous. So Modi finally agreed to transfer the sittings to Jean’s room in the rue du Delta, where Marguerite could at least change into a riding habit and back again with some semblance of privacy. She finally gave Modi an ultimatum. She was leaving in a week’s time and he had to finish. So he complied. The resulting portrait of her, hand on hip, has bold conviction but is not sympathetic. Perhaps the artist saw her as men of his age would have done, that is, too independent-minded for comfort.

  Modigliani painted Maurice Drouard, another habitué of the rue du Delta. His compelling study in blacks and strong background blues heightens the effect of Drouard’s almost hypnotically blue-eyed stare. There was another beautifully realized study, of Joseph Levi, a painter and picture restorer in Montmartre. Levi often lent Modigliani money, and the artist reciprocated with a forceful portrait of almost tactile strength and immediacy, in slashes of scarlet, ocher, and black. The blunt brushstrokes suggest a brief experiment with Fauvism, probably after a close study of Matisse and Derain.

  Modigliani’s style was constantly shifting. There was the seated nude of a young girl, slumping forward as if shrinking from the viewer’s gaze, the whole Gauguinesque in its sumptuous use of pastels: soft pinks, mauve-grays, blues, and blue-greens. Modigliani thought so little of this small masterpiece that he used the back of the canvas for something else. The influence of Toulouse-Lautrec, evident in his drawings, can also be seen in an early profile portrait of a girl and of Cézanne in The Beggar of Leghorn. The unpromising subject has been transformed by a virtuoso display of color: high blues and grayed-off greens.

  Modigliani was also experimenting with nude studies and, since sitters were expensive, was looking for compliant subjects wherever he could find them. One was “La Petite Jeanne,” another waif the Alexandre brothers had taken under their wing. A young girl recently arrived from the country, Jeanne was working as a model in art schools and had had the bad luck to be infected with a venereal disease for which she was being treated. Just then she was in the hospital with a case of German measles and being visited by Jean and Modigliani. The artist assumed the role of immortalizing her in paint. There were two nude studies, one of which was sensitively analyzed by Jeanne Modigliani. “The reserved expression of the sulky little face on its cylindrical neck, the calm solidity of the forms, the slightly asymmetrical displacement of the figure to the left, the extremely simple but shrewd organization of the background into two zones … her two breasts, one perfectly round, the other conical … all these make a perfectly balanced work whose style is thought out to the last detail.”

  Perhaps the most fully realized of his portraits at this period is Beggar Woman, an example of the “cool purposefulness” and economy of means that Modigliani was beginning to display. The lowered eyes, droop of the head, and particular set of the mouth speak volumes about the misery and pride of this anonymous daughter of the people. Before Modigliani finally finished Jean’s portrait he gave the painting to the latter and dedicated it to him “to keep him happy.” Jean hung it on a wall of the rue du Delta along with all the other Modiglianis (interspersed with photographs of Raphaels), to the resentment of other inhabitants. The Quatz’ Arts ball was imminent, but so were Jean’s exams. Parties had fallen off at the Delta along with Paul’s Saturday gatherings. Everything was uncharacteristically quiet. Besides, Paul had his suspicions about how well Modi was being looked after. Three months later, to parental astonishment, Paul cut short his Viennese studies and came home.

  With his probing and sensitive studies of character as exemplified by his portraits of the Alexandre father and sons, Maurice Drouard, and others, Modigliani had demonstrated his mastery of the delineation of character at an early stage. He was arriving at the end of a long line of masterful portraitists from Whistler and John Singer Sargent to Mary Cassatt and Cecilia Beaux. But the ways in which any artist could make his mark in this genre—once considered second only to large-scale narrative painting or depictions of the lives of saints—was coming to an end. There had to be a new approach, and Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso thought they had found it. The secret was to be revealed in African sculpture. Most of it, from the west or central areas of the continent, had been arriving in Europe in vast quantities since the 1870s and was so little valued that it could be picked up for small change in any flea market.

  Artists, however, were beginning to look at these curious objects with fresh eyes. Gertrude Stein recalled that Matisse had discovered a Vili figure from the Congo in a curiosity shop in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1913). Barely a year later, in 1907, Picasso began making repeated visits to the African collections at the Musée du Trocadéro. Like Matisse, Gauguin had also been attracted to the fragmented, Cubistic shapes, the pictorial flatness, and the spiritual component that they both recognized in the work, all of which suggested startling new possibilities.

  Modigliani’s own interest began when he saw samples of African art in the shop of an art dealer, Joseph Brummer. Then he, too, went with Paul Alexandre to the Trocadéro to see the Angkor exhibition in the Occidental wing.

  Alexandre wrote that what appealed to Modigliani about these primitive sculptures with their masklike faces had to do with simplification and purification, i.e., a search for the irreducible organic form. “I remember that he would stop
… in the place Clichy to admire those naive coloured pictures that were sold by Arabs, always showing the same landscape: a small bridge between two mountains. This search for simplification in drawing also delighted him in certain paintings by Douanier Rousseau or in Czobel’s figures from fairground stalls.”

  Frank Burty Haviland, himself a collector, painter, and friend of Picasso’s, whom Modigliani would paint, owned an extensive collection of African sculptures. According to Adolphe Basler, “they captivated Modigliani; he could not see enough of them. Soon he could think only in terms of these forms and proportions. He was transfixed by the pure and simple architectonic forms of the Cameroonian and Congolese fetishes, of those attenuations found in the elegantly stylized figurines and masks along the Ivory Coast.”

  The comment reveals that Modigliani also intuitively understood the mask’s symbolic possibilities. These objects, after all, were embodiments of ancestral spirits that they represented. They were, as Picasso wrote, “magical objects … The Blacks were intermediaries, ‘intercessors’ as I have since learnt. Against everything, against unknown and threatening spirits.” Masks were amulets that protected one from the very evil they summoned up and represented. They were powerful in themselves, and they conveyed power.

  It is axiomatic that the dandy and the actor had much in common; both are concerned with the protective mask of appearance. With Modigliani it is always hard to say which impulse dominated since both were marked traits of character. So it is not surprising that the theme of the mask should make a dramatic appearance at this time. Like the Baule sculptures from the Ivory Coast which they resemble, their slender silhouettes are elongated, faces triangular, with dominant noses, puckered lips, low foreheads, and eyes spaced far apart. Hair is pulled into tightly controlled shapes, sometimes embroidered with geometrical designs, ears are barely suggested, and the head is balanced on an exaggeratedly long neck. Like Modigliani’s marionette studies, inspired by Rousseau’s painting of a wedding party, the stonelike stares are unreadable. Yet something important has been achieved. Worship and sacrifice had endowed these African models with an uncanny potency. Modigliani had almost died, and something of that peril and suffering had, perhaps, infused his own creations with a premature gravity. The results, according to Alfred Werner, showed a “majesty and greatness … in a way reminiscent of ancient Egyptian or archaic Greek sculptures.” The masklike heads with their locked expressions were silent witnesses to Modigliani’s most secret concerns, the mysteries of life, death, and rebirth. Modigliani was not alone in attempting to go far beyond literal pictorial or sculptural representation. Honour and Fleming describe Monet’s semi-abstract painting Water Lilies in the same way. The painting’s “almost spaceless views downwards, on to and through the surface of the pool” bear “intimations of infinity.” Much the same poetic insights give depth and dimension to Modigliani’s wonderfully strange sculptural experiments, his own investigations into “an endless whole.”

  One of Modigliani’s early experiments in sculpture (image credit 7.2)

  Modigliani began his short career as a sculptor with the passion and determination that showed in everything he did. “The intensity of his attention to forms and colours was extraordinary,” Alexandre wrote. “When a figure haunted his mind he would draw feverishly with unbelievable speed, never retouching, starting the same drawing ten times in an evening by the light of a candle.” He sculpted in the same way. First he made endless sketches. Then, as before, and unlike Brancusi, who modeled first in clay, he worked directly on stone blocks that often were “liberated” from building sites and taken back to his studio in a wheelbarrow. Technical advice was always available, either from Drouard at the Delta or, most likely, from Brancusi, his neighbor at the Cité Falguière. Almost all of the twenty or so known sculptures are carved in a limestone known as “Pierre d’Euville,” quarried near a small town in eastern France, which is softer and easier to carve than marble. A few were in wood, also scavenged (or so it is also said) from the railroad ties being stockpiled for a nearby Métro station at Barbes-Rochechouart. And almost all are heads. There exists a sixty-three-inch statue of a woman, her arms cradled to suggest a Madonna sans baby, that may be a witness to the fact that the artist had ambitions he could not afford to realize. Given Modigliani’s chronic dissatisfaction with his work, the fact that he was constantly on the move and that sculptures are heavy, the wonder is that any survived. As it is these images seem to have sprung from his imagination almost fully formed, which, according to Alexandre, would not have satisfied him. He was looking for the “definitive form” that, Alexandre believed, he never attained. “He never abandoned an idea. But a finished work, if it was successful, soon left him indifferent. He would immediately move on to another.”

  The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, who visited Modigliani often in his studio at the Cité Falguière, wrote,

  Modigliani, like some others at the time, was very taken with the notion that sculpture was sick, that it had become very sick with Rodin and his influence. There was too much modeling in clay, too much “mud.” The only way to save sculpture was to start carving again, direct carving in stone. We had many very heated discussions about this, for I did not for one moment believe that sculpture was sick, nor did I believe that direct carving was by itself a solution to anything. But Modigliani could not be budged; he held firmly to his deep conviction … When we talked of different kinds of stone—hard stones and soft stones—Modigliani said that the stone itself made very little difference; the important thing was to give the carved stone the feeling of hardness, and that came from within the sculptor himself: regardless of what stone they use, some sculptors make their work look soft, but others can use even the softest of stones and give their sculpture hardness. Indeed, his own sculpture shows how he used this idea.

  It was characteristic of Modigliani to talk like this. His own art was an art of personal feeling. He worked furiously … without stopping to correct or ponder. He worked, it seemed, entirely by instinct—which was however extremely fine and sensitive, perhaps owing much to his Italian inheritance and his love of the painting of the early Renaissance masters.

  The British sculptor Jacob Epstein knew Modigliani well and, at one point, spent months with him looking for sheds where they could work together in Montmartre in the open air. “Our enquiries about empty huts only made the owners … look askance at us as suspicious persons,” Epstein recalled. “However we did find some very good Italian restaurants where Modi was received with open arms. All Bohemian Paris knew him. His geniality and esprit were proverbial … His studio at that time was a miserable hole within a courtyard and here he worked. It was then filled by nine or ten of those long heads which were suggested by African masks and one figure. They were carved in stone. A legend of the quarter said that Modigliani, when under the influence of hashish, embraced these sculptures.”

  As for Lipchitz, “I can see him as if it were today, stooping over those heads of his, explaining to me that he had conceived all of them as an ensemble. It seems to me that these heads were exhibited later the same year (1912) in the Salon d’Automne, arranged in step-wise fashion, like the tubes of an organ, to produce the special music he wanted.” Artists were the first to recognize that Modigliani was doing important work. Augustus John, who saw the same heads at about the same time, was equally impressed. “The stone heads affected me deeply. For some days afterwards I found myself under the hallucination of meeting people in the street who might have posed for them, and that without myself resorting to the Indian Herb. [A reference to hashish.] Can ‘Modi’ have discovered a new and secret aspect of ‘reality’?”

  Modigliani paid several return visits to Livorno in the next few years, the first in the summer of 1909. Even Jeanne Modigliani, who had the benefit of cross-references in the private family correspondence, decided that the situation was hopelessly muddled. No one knew exactly how often he returned in the years before 1913, not to mention the precise state of his
health.

  Writing in 1941 in Artist Quarter, Charles Beadle, a sporadic witness to actual events, described the day when friends found Modigliani collapsed and unconscious in a studio and contributed the money to send him home, dating this as the summer of 1909. Other evidence has established that this incident, which certainly happened, must have come later. A postcard from Eugénie to Emanuele’s wife Vera, announcing Modigliani’s return, adds, “He seems very well.” Other correspondence, with Paul Alexandre, establishes that Modigliani was in Livorno for three months, returning to Paris at the end of September.

  Dedo might have been slightly run-down. He certainly needed a new wardrobe, and Caterina, the family’s dressmaker, known for her foul mouth and expert tailoring, came in by the day. She was put to work on clothes for Dedo, although Margherita claimed that her brother “was extravagant and ungrateful. He shortened the sleeves of a new jacket with one slash of the scissors and tore out the lining of his Borsalino to make it lighter.”

  By then Dedo had become a drain on the family’s purse with no end in sight. Douglas also states that Umberto Brunelleschi, a painter friend of Dedo’s youth, hearing of his desperate state, sought out Emanuele Modigliani in Rome to present the story. Brunelleschi reported that Emanuele was not sympathetic: “Je m’en fous. I don’t give a hoot. He’s a drunkard and his drawings make me laugh.”