Laure was appalled at this cavalier attitude toward his health. What if he got ill again? The house could not be heated. Suppose he became bedridden? How would she find a doctor? She was in a panic and cut short their stay. Meantime, Modigliani could not understand what the fuss was about. He felt fine. Or was he only acting, as usual? What feelings of despair was he concealing? “He went out, reeling; / his mouth was twisted, desolate,” Akhmatova wrote in one of her poems of that period, “I Wrung My Hands.” He had watched her leave and had no way of knowing whether they would ever meet again; as it happened, they never did. There is a real possibility that she wanted to stay in Paris, but was as badly off as he was and there was no way he could possibly support her. What he needed just then was someone who could support him. That possibility is suggested by her comment, in old age, that “Modigliani is the reason for the tragic consequences of my life—of my whole life.”
Caryatid is one in a series of drawings, watercolors, and oils that absorbed Modigliani’s attention for two or three years (1911–13). This particular version shows a standing figure, her long nose, diminutive mouth, and almond eyes precariously balanced on a cone of neck, nude save for what could be ropes of precious stones girdling her waist and falling over her hips. She is, like his sculptured heads, expressionless. She stands, one leg slightly bent, against a background of black brushstrokes superimposed on pink flesh tones, and bending harmoniously to the outlines of her waist and full thighs.
She could be anyone—a goddess, a wood nymph, a priestess—but she is actually one in a series of female figures whose arms are raised to hold up—something. Just what is never clear. Basler wrote, “For several years Modigliani did nothing but draw, and trace round and supple arabesques, faintly emphasizing with a bluish or rosy tone the elegant contours of those numerous caryatids that he always planned to execute in stone. And he attained a design very sure, very melodious, at the same time with a personal accent, with great charm, sensitive and fresh.” The woman as prop and buttress: this was Modigliani’s repetitive image, now standing, now crouching, now bent under the weight or lightly poised beneath it.
Caryatids, in the Encyclopædia Britannica’s definition, were draped female figures used as supports for entablatures in Greek, Roman, and Renaissance architecture. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary adds helpfully that the word derives from the Latin and Greek, karyatides, literally “princesses at the Temple of Diana.” That goddess, usually depicted as about to go hunting, wearing a tunic and carrying a bow and arrow, was also that of fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth, and sometimes that of the forest and wild animals. One of her very early temples, before 495 BC, was discovered on the northern shores of Lake Nemi, on a stone terrace with niches cut in the back wall that apparently served as chapels.
Modigliani’s grand scheme was to create a “Temple of Beauty.” Since he and Brancusi were working together closely at this period it is perhaps no coincidence that Brancusi, whose own grand scheme included complete sculptural environments, also came up with the idea of a temple and worked on it for decades. Brancusi’s most elaborate design, sometimes called a Temple of Love, or a Temple of Meditation and Temple of Deliverance, was commissioned by Yeshwant Holkar, maharajah of Indore in the 1930s. Brancusi envisioned a completely enclosed space with a vaulted ceiling, a pool, and sculptures placed so as to be spotlit, at certain times of year, by sunlight focused from a ceiling opening. (It was never built.) Modigliani’s own grand schemes, if they were ever committed to paper, have not been found. But like Brancusi he was using his studio as an impromptu stage on which to calculate the precise placement of his sculptured heads, along with the caryatids, only one of which exists. (It is three feet tall and at the Guggenheim.)
One finds at least one other common theme between the work of the two men. As early as 1911 Modigliani was using a curious motif, a column decorated with geometric designs, seen in a portrait of Paul Alexandre. A symbol of the quest for the infinite, the Endless Column is an idea Brancusi took up six or seven years later. In his work it became a sculptural Tree of Life, the pillar supporting the firmament and the axis mundi on which the world turned. Restellini wrote, “Was Modigliani the originator of one of Brancusi’s major creations?”
For Modigliani the repetition of the caryatid theme would suggest allusions to death and fertility and the idea of woman as divine intermediary. Like Brancusi’s, his experiments with sculpture had a broadly ambitious goal even if his temple, too, was never built. It was an incantatory circle of stone, meant to protect and guard, sustain and inspire. The festival of Diana took place in mid-August during a full moon, and she was worshipped with torches. One of Modigliani’s girlfriends recalled dining by the light of a guttering candle, fixed to the head of a sculpture. When Epstein visited the studio it was already filled with nine or ten long heads and a single figure. Modigliani, who had spent so many nights of his young life hovering between life and death, was justifiably afraid of the dark. Epstein said, “I recall that one night, when we had left him very late, he came running down the passage after us, calling us to come back like a frightened child.” Each evening, candles fixed to each stone head would transform a squalid studio into a sacred space. One imagines him seated there in the darkness, safe in the magic circle of his imaginary temple.
CHAPTER 8
“What I Am Searching For”
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
—WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
IN THOSE YEARS before the outbreak of World War I, Modigliani and his benefactor, Paul Alexandre, were in close contact, one that continued until the day in 1914 when the latter was mobilized by the French army and marched off to the front. The rue du Delta continued its happy, improvisational way of doing things, with another plate at the table for Modigliani, until the summer of 1913. That July the city of Paris reclaimed its ramshackle villa and Alexandre moved to a spacious nearby apartment at 10 Place Dancourt, next door to the Théâtre de Montmartre. This was furnished with the usual élan from whatever happened to be handy. The Moulin Rouge windmill was being demolished, so Alexandre bought a balustrade to install on what seems to have been a balcony, as a protection. He also acquired a small crystal chandelier. Things were obviously looking up at the new quarters, which had elegant high ceilings. Then Alexandre invited Modigliani to do the interior decoration. Modigliani said, “For it to be really good we need to accentuate the feeling of height.” Alexandre wrote, “And so we started to saw off the table legs and also lower the few miserable chairs we had. This gave it style. Whereas poor stylists minimize contrast, good stylists heighten contrast. Right up high, on a level with the chandelier, which we had also shortened, we hung Modigliani’s large red figures.” This tantalizing reference is to works that have never been brought to light. Alexandre concluded, “But we did not enjoy the place Dancourt for long.”
Modigliani’s studio at the Cité Falguière (image credit 8.1)
Although an habitué, Modigliani was not resident there either. His move to the Cité Falguière in the spring of 1909 had been at Brancusi’s suggestion and he was lucky enough to get a ground-floor studio, which staved off the drudgery of hauling blocks up and down stairs, and one with an outdoor patio. Foujita, who also lived there, said that the now-demolished building “had a wide entrance on the rue Falguière and you went through a court to a small door at the back which led to our studios. You had to cross a sort of bridge, like the approach to a medieval fortress, though the building was anything but fortress-like.” The studios were cheap and had plenty of light but like artists’ accommodations everywhere in Paris, impossible to heat. Warshawsky wrote of his own, “The building in which we were, of recent construction, was a flimsy affair of thin bricks and stucco, through which the dampness from outside penetrated, with the result that, despite the fact that the exterior temperature was nothing like so low as it would be in America, I actually suffered more intensely from the cold than I had ever done befor
e.” They all knew where you went to spend every waking hour not devoted to work: to the cafés. And Montparnasse had two outstanding destinations, facing opposite each other at the corners of the boulevards de Montparnasse and Raspail: the Dôme and the Rotonde. The Dôme, much frequented by the Americans, was already open when Modigliani arrived. The Rotonde, opening in around 1910, was immediately adopted by Picasso, Diego Rivera, Ilya Ehrenburg, Marevna, Ortiz de Zárate, Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Léger, Kisling—in short, everyone who counted. Including Modigliani. “It was the last great expansion of the Parisian café, an enchanted place where, for the price of a cup of coffee, you could spend the day, demand free notepaper with pen and ink, and eat your way through baskets of free bread knobs,” Patrick Marnham wrote in his biography of Rivera. “Venir au café meant, according to Jean Moréas, to arrive at 8:00 a.m. for breakfast and to be there still at 5:00 a.m. on the following day.” The sculptor Chana Orloff recalled that they could spend hours in front of a single café crème, warming up.
The popular terrace of the Rotonde in 1919–20 (image credit 8.2)
The Cité Falguière was around the corner from the Gare Montparnasse and within walking distance of 242 boulevard Raspail, where Picasso, in the first flush of his success, had taken an elegant new apartment. Montmartre was no longer chic. The quartier had not yet become the tourist trap it is nowadays, ankle deep in artists selling themselves as portraitists and exhibiting amazingly identical styles, or shameless imitations of Utrillo’s cityscapes, or monkey-faced Mona Lisas and similar conceits. Tourists were not shuffling, shoulder to shoulder in dazed circles around the Place du Tertre hoping in vain for a place to sit down. But there were new faces in the cafés, the rents were going up, and pretty soon the cozy group of artists would not be able to find each other. So one went to the Rotonde to see and be seen.
At the bar of the Dôme, a group of regulars, among them three who helped “romanticize” the legend of Modigliani after his death. Far left, in profile, Francis Carco. In the foreground, Michel Georges-Michel, and standing, rear, with coat and scarf, André Salmon (image credit 8.3)
Newly fashionable it might be, but Montparnasse was hardly virgin territory. Those impeccable historians Klüver and Martin point out that painters and sculptors had been settling there since the early nineteenth century, when great open fields were full of vegetables for the Paris markets. In those days artists could take over workshops and convert them into studios, living comfortably in summer cottages. By 1890, nearly a third lived in Montparnasse, taking classes in the nearby ateliers of Bouguereau, Carolus-Duran, Gérôme, and others. After Picasso arrived in the summer of 1912 that settled the matter for everyone else. But Modigliani, with his usual prescience, was there first.
The center of Montparnasse, the Carrefour Vavin, the winter of 1905 (image credit 8.4)
“Carissimo,” Modigliani wrote to Paul Alexandre in May 1910, one of the many short notes now in the Alexandre archive, “The comet has not yet arrived…Terrible. I’ll definitely see you on Friday—after death of course.” Modigliani was referring to Halley’s Comet, named for the seventeenth-century British astronomer who had correctly predicted its return in 1759, 1835, and on May 18, 1910, the day Modigliani wrote.
Comets, small bodies of gases and dust, shooting across the heavens with streaming tails, had been known since ancient times, predicting, it was thought, catastrophe: famine, plague, or war. Thousands that day climbed up to the Butte Montmartre to get a better look at the once-in-a-lifetime event. In Italy, the pope ordered special prayers; in New York, “comet parties” took place in all the big hotels. In Paris the mood was less than superstitious but not euphoric. A newspaper columnist summed up the feeling the next day with the comment that the comet appeared on time but failed to explode and the end of the world was indefinitely postponed—mercifully unaware of how short that postponement would be. Still, 1910 was a strange year, full of signs and portents. By the time the comet arrived over Paris, where the Seine had flooded since time immemorial, the city had been inundated by the worst flood in 150 years. In January, four months earlier, the banks burst, the bridges threatened to collapse, and the water stood seventeen feet (five meters) deep in a train station along the quays, the future Musée d’Orsay. Looters emerged, the Métro and sewer systems were flooded, and boats and rats paddled along the boulevards, although the flood spared Montparnasse. A total of fifty thousand people were homeless and were fed in soup kitchens; no doubt Modigliani also took advantage of the free meals.
Paris under water after the great flood of 1910, contemporary postcard (image credit 8.5)
This was the year when the horse began to vanish from city streets, replaced by omnibuses and the demon motorcar. Traveling up in the air was an even newer idea, thanks to Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, whose airships were named in his honor. This option also seemed poised for mass acceptance even if two such huge and cumbersome Zeppelins crashed that summer. Then there was the undeniable fact that something strange was happening to women. Encouraged by the great couturier Paul Poiret, they were refusing to wear corsets. The female silhouette, once padded front and rear, was gently deflating like a balloon and women were daring to wear startling V-necks, bloomers, and all manner of similarly immodest garments. But the biggest revolution was in the skirt, which, after centuries of full-length concealment of the female leg, was starting to leave the floor. First, it coyly revealed an ankle. By the end of World War I it had soared to mid-calf and, as everyone knows, reached its apogee a decade later when it hit the knee. It all meant something—but what? Virginia Woolf wrote, “[I]n or about December 1910, the human character changed.” This was surely an overstatement, but the old ways were being swept aside and, along with them, the traditional limits placed on women of the kitchen and the bedroom. That, too, would have been disorienting.
In the art world, changes were equally rapid and arbitrary with consequences no one could foresee. Modigliani once told Louis Latourette untruthfully that, Picasso excepted, the only painter he admired was Rousseau. Modigliani was no doubt thinking of Rousseau’s painting The Wedding that made such an impression when he saw it with Alexandre.
No doubt he felt along with others who loved and shamelessly teased the Grand Old Man of art (he was then sixty-five) that there was something admirable about his childlike directness and his sweet belief that he and Picasso were the two greatest artists. And Modigliani would have shared Rousseau’s love of music. That artist played the violin and had a music school where performances were given, although, Warshawsky said with typical frankness, it “took considerable courage” to sit through one of Rousseau’s concerts.
“Le Douanier” Rousseau, 1890 (image credit 8.6)
In 1908 Picasso, in mock homage, gave a party for Rousseau, although everything went wrong. The meal never arrived. Rousseau, seated on a thronelike chair, and with too much to drink, fell asleep. Some wag thought it would be a great joke to smear his mouth with a soapy foam to suggest delirium tremens. A small pyramid of candle wax from a nearby candelabra formed itself on his head. The tragic and farcical seemed inextricably mixed in the life of this gullible and bumbling clown. Still, no one was prepared for what happened in 1910. Rousseau had just completed one of his most magical jungle scenes, The Dream, and it was on view that March in the Salon des Indépendants. In addition to the predictable lush foliage and hungry wild beasts, it depicted a lavishly curved lady reclining on a sofa. The model was a fiftyish widow who worked in a draper’s shop. Rousseau was madly in love with her, even persuading Vollard and Apollinaire to write poetry in her honor. He wanted to make her his third wife, but the lady refused. She is said to have remarked, “His breath smells of death”—and was not even tempted when he offered to leave her his estate.
That summer, Rousseau hurt his leg and infection set in. He was admitted to the hospital, where he spent his days writing letters to his beloved that were not answered. Then, on September 2, 1910, and to general consternation, he died. A gr
eat Primitivist had, simply by being himself, attracted the interest of some sophisticated theorists, Picasso among them, showing what could be done to explore dream states. What is the nature of the Self? “For me the essential thing is to tell our life by any mythological means,” Salvador Dalí once said. Rousseau, with his direct line to the unconscious, seemed to have discovered intuitively what the Surrealists, Dalí included, would have to puzzle out painfully in the years to come.
The first writings of Francis Carco, called Instincts, were published in 1911. Carco, a poet and novelist, Modigliani’s contemporary, was writing about sensuality, alcohol, violence, and la vie de Bohème. He continued to publish his observations and reminiscences, many of them fictionalized portraits, for the next thirty years. He saw la vie de Bohème from a particular psychological perspective, as the child of a moralistic and often cruel father, who realized how much revolt and revenge underlay his choice of lifestyle. Since he had the gift of detachment he also saw others’ choices with particular clarity and discrimination.
For Carco, Bohemia was “a form of social theater … for which its ostensibly hostile audience felt an obscure need,” Jerrold Seigel wrote in Bohemian Paris. Bohemian life often led to nothing, Carco believed, “because its flow was ‘a perpetual dispersion.’ New possibilities, new temptations, confronted its denizens at every moment. Their minds were beset by contradictory goals and attractions rendered more persuasive by idleness, boredom and poverty.” Those on the fringes of a particular artistic movement but without the talent would spend their lives in a fruitless pursuit of the chimeras of their youth. “Between the two wars, Carco found that Cubism had left behind a human debris that reminded him of the earlier ex-companions of Toulouse-Lautrec: ‘these endings of generations are horrifying.’ ”
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