Carco thought, in common with Baudelaire, that the only escape from the eventual annihilation of the spirit that Bohemia represented was the discipline of work. In those days work was all that Modigliani had. There were very few sales, he still had no dealer, he shifted from one squalid hole to the next or moved in with this week’s mistress, and the future was bleak. Although he always expressed complete confidence in his gifts, he must have met those ravaged beings who had bet everything on a throw of the artistic dice and lost, and wondered at some level whether he, too, was chasing a mirage. This may have strengthened his determination not to follow any movement, relying on his own idiosyncratic vision; better to be ridiculed, but noticed, like Rousseau, than destined for oblivion. Or perhaps—he was, after all, only twenty-four—he never thought of such things. He was simply being true to the vows he and Ghiglia had made seven years before. There was a battle ahead. They must be prepared to suffer every hardship, bend every sinew in pursuit of the ultimate achievement. That goal could not be self-aggrandizement. As for John Keats, another tuberculosis sufferer, so with Modigliani: it was art for art’s sake. “Beauty must be a good in its own right, even a metaphysical principle. In serving beauty, Keats came to believe, he was in some obscure way serving the divine.”
In the four years Modigliani worked as a sculptor, roughly 1910 to the spring of 1913, he made repeated attempts to sell his work. Besides exhibiting his heads at the Salon des Indépendants he was trying to interest dealers and when this, too, failed, he hit on a scheme to show them himself. He met a young Portuguese artist, then living at the Cité Falguière, De Souza Cardoso, also called Amedeo, whose style resembled his own. “Only Cardoso’s more highly coloured use of drawing … and the more decorative value of his line allow us to distinguish his works from those of Modigliani,” Jeanne Modigliani wrote. Cardoso’s family was comfortably off, and after he married and moved into a new and more spacious studio near the Quai d’Orsay, in 1911 the two Amedeos decided to hold their own show. Cardoso’s paintings and drawings were hung beside Modigliani’s caryatids, and seven of Modigliani’s heads were placed, with great care, around the room. It was a bold, even clever, move. Friends came to admire but did not stay to buy. The critics ignored the exhibition. Nothing sold.
The first sale of his sculpture did not take place for four years, and then the buyer, as might be expected, was not a gallery-goer or even a connoisseur but a famous artist. In 1913 Augustus John, over from London, visited Modigliani’s studio with his wife Dorelia. He found the floor “covered with statues, all much alike and prodigiously long and narrow” and bought two of them on the spot. The price was a few hundred francs. For a man accustomed to surviving on three francs a day it must have seemed as if the heavens had opened. Modigliani slightingly described himself as a creator of garden statuary. But he also remarked, “Comme c’est chic d’être dans le progrès!” (How chic it is to be in the swim), and the two struck up a friendship. Nina Hamnett, the British sculptor who had yet to meet Modigliani, recalled being told by Epstein that Modigliani wanted to be paid in installments, a request that some in his circle would have found hard to believe.
Modigliani was always sketching portraits of his friends, and once at Montmartre he joined the legions of “café artists” who made the rounds in the hope of finding willing sitters. Their methods varied little, according to Sisley Huddleston, an English writer who wrote about Montparnasse and Bohemia in the years between the wars. The artist, portfolio under his arm, would enter the café, size up the situation, and then wend his way through the tables. He was likely to stop hopefully and smile. At the least look of enquiry he had drawn up a chair and begun work. From long experience he knew the subject would be a lady, preferably wearing a splendid hat to which he would give close attention. If the artist had done his work the portrait would be flattering, the lady delighted, and her escort perfectly willing to buy. Most artists, Huddleston said, were lucky to find three willing subjects a night, and if they all bought he was even luckier.
Modigliani could be seen almost every night at the Rotonde, with his nonchalant walk, his blue portfolio always under his arm, and then “drawing ceaselessly in a notebook the pages of which he was forever tearing out and crumpling up,” Carco wrote. Conrad Moricand, a painter, author, and astrologer, often watched him at work. He wrote that Modigliani would look with concentration on the face before him and then begin to draw with an incisive pencil. “His working method was always the same. He would begin with the two essential points, first the nose of his model, which one finds emphasized in all his work, next the eyes, with their different polarities, then the mouth and finally the outline of the face, delicately indicated by cross-hatching.” As he began work his handsome face would contort itself into the most frightful grimaces and he would be deaf to everything going on around him, including the constant jokes and teasing. “He was usually good for four or five drawings like this, sometimes more, that were superb. The rest were usually dissolved in drink.”
The painting of Jean Cocteau by Modigliani that the sitter took some pains not to own (image credit 8.7)
Maurice de Vlaminck, who also watched him working, said, “I can see him (he was no fool) distributing his sketches to surrounding friends in exchange for a drink. With the gesture of a millionaire he would hold out the sheet of paper (on which he sometimes went so far as to sign his name) as he might have held out a banknote in payment to someone who had just brought him a glass of whisky.” Jean Cocteau said, “He used to hand out his drawings like some gypsy fortuneteller, giving them away, and that explains why, although there are some fifty drawings of me in existence, I only own one.”
Cocteau, painter, writer, and film director, was also painted by Modigliani. While he sat for his portrait the rain beat ceaselessly on the skylight and Cocteau, who had that reputation, talked without stopping—not that anyone listened, according to the poet Pierre Reverdy, who was there. Cocteau once referred to the resulting portrait as “diabolical” and said he considered it proof that Modigliani detested him. Diabolical is too strong a word, but the painting did not flatter, as had so many other artists who painted this prominent personality. In any event Cocteau never took the painting home. He bought it for the derisory sum of five francs and then, under the pretext that the painting was too large and he did not have the money to transport it, left it in the studio of their mutual friend Moïse Kisling. Time went by, Kisling gave it to the proprietor of the Rotonde to settle a debt, and it hung in the café over a banquette for several years. The painting went through several hands and was finally sold to a pair of American collectors for millions of francs. Cocteau did not like that much either. “All I have left,” he complained, “is a colour photograph.”
Foujita recalled, “At that period Modigliani was spending most of his time on sculpture; he did no painting and only made pencil drawings. He always dressed in corduroy, and he wore checked shirts and a red belt, like a workman. His thick hair was usually tousled. He drank a great deal of Pernod and often did not have enough money to pay for it. When people invited him to have a drink at their table, he would do sketches and then give them the drawings by way of thanks. He had a habit of scowling and grimacing a good deal, and he was always saying ‘Sans blague!’ (‘No kidding!’)…We were both fond of poetry, and every time he came to see me he recited a poem by Tagore.”
An English artist, C. R. W. Nevinson, met Modigliani in 1911, for a time shared a studio, and kept up the friendship until he died. Nevinson described him as “a quiet man of charming manners … I knew him as well as, if not better than, most men … Modigliani should have been the father of a family. He was kind, constant, correct and considerate: a bourgeois Jew.” Nevinson added, “[H]e loved women and women loved him. They seemed to know instinctively that though he was poor, they were in the presence of a great man. Painters were two a penny in Montparnasse, yet even the most mercenary of the girls would treat him as the painter and the prince. They would look after
him, scrub for him, cook for him, sit for him; and before they went away they would beg him to accept a little gift, ‘for art’s sake.’ ” “ ‘Modi was all charm, all impulsiveness, all disdain,’ his future dealer Paul Guillaume said, ‘and his aristocratic soul remained among us in all its many-coloured, ragged beauty.’ ”
“For art’s sake …” There are endless stories, most of them probably apocryphal, about Modigliani’s overnight flights from one miserable hovel to another and the chagrin of landlords who arrived to find a few sticks of furniture and some apparently worthless artworks. “So little did he value the belongings he had seized,” is the usual opening sentence, “that the …” landlord, in a fury, gives the paintings away, tosses them onto a rubbish dump, tears them up, or burns them. The story concerning Modigliani’s overnight departure from the Cité Falguière has the merit of being original, at least. In this case the landlord’s wife decides the yards of canvas will come in handy as dust covers for her mattresses, sofas, and the like. The day finally arrives, long after Modigliani’s death, that he is famous. A dealer appears at the door. He has heard. He will pay. He flashes a wad of francs. The landlord is overjoyed. Where are those dirty old canvases we were using? His wife produces them. They are blank. Oh, that nasty old paint? She made sure to scrape it all off before wrapping their valuables. Her husband collapses.
A great artist starts all over again, this time in a hut at the bottom of the garden at 216 boulevard Raspail, with a mattress on the floor, a single rickety chair, a jug and a basin, and whatever he has saved of his unfinished sculptures. The cultured man who has willingly embraced the fate of the meanest workman, wearing his clothes, sharing his privations—the contradiction is puzzling only if one discounts the family history, one that began the day he was born. He would have learned from his mother that it was possible to retain one’s pride no matter how humbling the circumstances. Thanks to his brother Emanuele, he was well versed in the class struggle, exploitation, and oppression. Although he took no active role in politics, Modigliani considered himself a Socialist. His knowledge of what the working masses endured had made for a special mixture of anger, indignation, and sympathetic understanding that Modigliani would bring to bear on outcasts. In Paris he sought out and befriended at least two unappreciated and vastly talented artists whose situations were as desperate as his own. One of them was Maurice Utrillo.
Maurice Utrillo, in the ménage he shared with his artist mother, Susan Valadon, and his stepfather, André Utter, 1920s (image credit 8.8)
Utrillo, the illegitimate son of Suzanne Valadon, had been given wine diluted with water from babyhood by Valadon’s illiterate mother. By the time he was eighteen he was a hopeless alcoholic and spent the first of many visits in an insane asylum. When he was released his mother, herself an artist, was advised to find him a hobby and gave him his first box of paints. He turned out to have an astonishing gift, beginning the career that would bring him international fame. Carco wrote of his Montmartre streets and squares, “There shines upon the walls, upon the houses with closed shutters, upon the brown windows of bistrots a fixed light which comes from nowhere, except from … dream regions.” When sober Utrillo was shy, unassuming, and gentle. When drunk he would begin to yell, stare around the room, and start breaking glasses and bottles. For years he was treated as the village idiot, subject to the kinds of humor that makes a staggering man even funnier by being tripped up, or, as he lies comatose in a gutter, stripping him nude. Artists are always the first to appreciate each other’s work, and a few were beginning to recognize Utrillo’s special qualities when Modigliani met him, but dealers rejected him. Modigliani, whose eye for talent was exceptional, rose to Utrillo’s defense.
Michel Georges-Michel, author of the portrait of Modigliani as haunted, hunted, and self-destructive, is hardly a reliable witness. However, in one case, he seems likely to have been close to the mark. He recounts that he was there when Modigliani began painting a portrait of Léon Bakst, the costume and scene designer, and the conversation came around to the depressing nature of Utrillo’s subject matter.
Modigliani responded, “One paints only what one sees,” Georges-Michel recalled.
Take the painters out of their hovels! Yes, art lovers and dealers are shocked that instead of landscapes we paint only ugly suburbs with trees all black and twisted and covered in soot and smoke, and interiors in which the living room is right next to the toilet! Since we are forced to live like rag-and-bone men in such lowly dwellings, these are the impressions which we reproduce. Every age gets the painters it deserves, and the subjects drawn from life which it gives them. During the Renaissance the painters lived in palaces, in velvet, in the sun! And today, just look at the filth in which a painter such as Utrillo must live, at the hospitals he has been forced to attend, then you will no longer ask why he paints only dirt-encrusted walls, disease-ridden streets, barred window after barred window!
Utrillo, that damaged and fragile talent, at least had the desultory ministrations of his mother and her new husband, André Utter, an apprentice tiler on the Butte Montmartre turned artist, who became his stepfather. Father and stepson were the same age—a state of affairs that made both acutely uncomfortable. Valadon and Utter periodically rescued Utrillo, made him paint, tried to ration his wine, and, when all else failed, put him back in the hospital. After Utrillo amazed everyone by becoming commercially successful they gratefully helped him spend his money.
Curiously, no paintings or drawings of Utrillo by Modigliani have come down to us, although the artist memorialized almost everyone he knew, sometimes repeatedly. But another friend often sat for his portrait, Chaim Soutine. This eleventh child of a Russian Jewish tailor, living in a filthy, one-room hut, starved and beaten, was rescued by a rabbi who recognized his talent and sent him to art school, first in Minsk, then the Fine Arts Academy in Vilna. There he met two other talented artists, Michel Kikoïne and Pinchus Krémègne. His gift was clearly evident, but so was his poor health. Years of semi-starvation had made him almost as dependent on wine as Utrillo. Marevna, who knew him well, wrote that by the time Soutine arrived in Paris, “his digestion was already ruined and he had a diseased liver. In addition, he suffered from a nervous affliction of the left eye and … frequent attacks of some, as yet undiagnosed, malady.” Later he would have an emotional breakdown, painted in unmistakable outline in a series of contorted compositions.
Soutine, in his days at La Ruche when he was painting flayed carcasses. Paulette Jourdain, one of Modigliani’s models, is seen in a partial view. (image credit 8.9)
Krémègne, Kikoïne, and Marevna were staying at La Ruche when Soutine joined them in 1913. Unlike the Bateau Lavoir and the Cité Falguière, ramshackle apartments which occasionally kept artists and sculptors out of the rain, La Ruche (“the Beehive”) was specifically designed for artists by its philanthropic owner, Alfred Boucher, a wealthy sculptor. The international exhibition of 1900 contained a polygonal wine pavilion designed by Gustave Eiffel, of Eiffel Tower fame. Boucher, who owned semi-rural land on the southern edge of Montparnasse, had the clever idea of turning the building into studios, honeycomb fashion, so that each unit would have its own source of natural light. The building was moved to its new site and further ornamented with happy heedlessness. An enormous Art Nouveau wrought-iron doorway, salvaged from the Women’s Pavilion, graced its façade, along with some caryatids from the British India exhibition; the total effect was whimsical, even playful. Then he rented out the studios at cost to up-and-coming young artists like Léger, Soffici, Chagall, Archipenko, and Zadkine.
A recent view of the gated entrance to La Ruche (image credit 8.10)
La Ruche was full of fun but the same discomfort and, once a few feckless tenants had moved in, the predictable camp followers: mice, rats, cockroaches, lice, and the ever-present flies. It had a special drawback in that it flanked the slaughterhouses of Vaugirard. To its other idiosyncrasies were added the wafting smells of putrifying flesh and the bellows of
dying beasts. Nevertheless, its eighty studios were in great demand and more would be built. La Ruche was “seething with vitality,” Marevna wrote.
Soutine made an immediate impression on her. “His clothes, unlike the workmen’s blue linen jackets and trousers favoured by other artists, were beige, with red and blue neckerchiefs; I was told that he made them himself. Like the clothes of the other artists they were always covered with paint.” She thought he was plain, even ugly. René Gimpel did not have quite that impression: “He is small, sturdy, with a thick crop of hair whirling around his head. He has deep, round, hooded eyes; they are of hard stone.” Marevna may have been influenced by Soutine’s belittling self-portraits, which always show him with tiny eyes, a bulbous nose, and huge, prominent mouth and ears, distortions which one finds uncannily mirrored in the portraits of Francis Bacon. However, actual photographs give a different impression: that of a sensitive, introspective, even handsome man. As with Utrillo, Modigliani’s sympathies were immediately aroused, and for similar reasons. Soutine did not speak French: Modigliani would teach him. This reticent, fearful, unwashed peasant, who slept in doorways and had never used a toothbrush or handled a fork, obviously needed a mentor. And Modigliani, at his most destitute, never looked poor. His suit would be clean, his shirt, which he had washed the night before, rumpled but otherwise presentable, his shoes cleaned, and no one knew how he managed, but every morning, bright and early, he was shaved and ready for work. Modigliani the outgoing, vivacious intellectual and this diamond in the rough took one look at each other and became friends. Soutine said, “He gave me confidence in myself.”
Soutine is best known for his depictions of flayed carcasses. But in fact, as an exhibition in Paris amply demonstrated in 2008, these are only a small part of an oeuvre that encompasses portraits, still lifes, landscapes, cityscapes, and much more. In contrast to Modigliani’s refined and elegant canvases, Soutine’s are noisy and spontaneous. They swivel and pivot with a quality reminiscent of Chagall; once, when alcohol made him dizzy, Modigliani said, “Everything dances around me as in a landscape by Soutine.” Soutine’s landscapes do not unroll, they buzz and hum. Cityscapes shatter like kaleidoscopes, portraits seize you by the throat, and still lifes throb with the music of the universe.
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