Soutine, early 1920s, with his dealer, Léopold Zborowski, at left (image credit 8.11)
The manner in which Modigliani painted hands is often meant as a clue to the initiated. In one portrait of Soutine Modigliani seems to be emulating the model set by Cézanne some years before. In his portrait La Femme à la cafetière, Cézanne depicts a lady, stolid, mannish, all in blue, hands limply placed in her lap. She looks formidable, but then one notices that her sleeves stop short to reveal her oddly vulnerable wrists. Modigliani used this device to the same effect in one of his portraits of Soutine, then in his early twenties but looking more like a forlorn adolescent. In another portrait painted the same year (1916), Soutine’s right hand, resting on a knee, is oddly placed with a gap between the third and fourth finger. This was meant, Marc Restellini wrote in L’Ange au visage grave, to signify the Jewish priestly blessing. If so, it was a subtle reference to the heritage they shared that many would not recognize. Without minimizing Soutine’s prominent eyes and full lips, “Modigliani manages also to convey a kind of poetic beauty in his sitter, that special brand of idealization for which he is justly famous,” Kenneth E. Silver wrote. It could have also conveyed the special place Soutine had won in Modigliani’s affections. When he was very ill, Modigliani told his dealer that he could not recover. But, he said, “don’t worry—I’m leaving you Soutine.”
In his study Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905–1945, (1985), Silver described the unique status Modigliani held among other Jewish immigrant artists and sculptors. They were Ashkenazim, recently arrived from Russia and Poland: Sonia Delaunay, Moïse Kisling, Oscar Miestchaninoff, Simon Mondzain, Marevna, Jacques Lipchitz, Léon Indenbaum, Kikoïne, and Krémègne. Modigliani was a Sephardic Jew but also Italian born, with an important link to the “Greco-Roman and Italianate roots of Western art.” In a quick sketch he made of Chana Orloff on the back of an envelope, Modigliani wrote in Hebrew letters, “Chana, Daughter of Raphael,” enlightening in its casual cross-cultural references. Silver notes that many religious symbols, not just Stars of David, appear in Modigliani’s art. As for his personal beliefs, Modigliani was casually blunt. “Hello, I’m Jewish,” was the direct approach to anyone who was not, as Akhmatova and Hamnett have recorded. He was equally ready to start a fight if necessary. A story widely repeated has him berating a group of Royalists at a café table who were overheard making anti-Semitic remarks. Noël Alexandre wrote that in 1910 Modigliani gave his father a drawing, a portrait of himself in a Jewish tunic. He was also wearing a beard, something that Paul Alexandre carefully noted he only kept for a few weeks. As for Orloff, who hailed from Palestine, Modigliani once told her, “I carry no religion, but if I did it would be the ancient Jewish religion of my ancestors.”
“I’ll definitely see you on Friday—after death of course.” Paul Alexandre, who was never interested in such things, would have dismissed that reference with a laugh. But for Modigliani the omen of a comet streaking across the sky had just as much possible significance as the most profound questions about art. “How we used to hammer out the solution of things in those days!” wrote Christopher Nevinson, his sometime roommate. Every night at the cafés there would be endless discussions, on “harmony, and sometimes colour, sometimes drawing, sometimes imagination, sometimes fantasy, sometimes spiritualism, sometimes the unconscious … sometimes religion, and sometimes the lack of it.” There was a moment when Modigliani was passionately interested in the prophecies of Nostradamus, Ilya Ehrenburg recalled, ascribing to that sixteenth-century savant all manner of predictions, including the unification of Italy, the fall of Napoleon, and the use of airplanes in war.
Léopold Survage, an artist who met Modigliani at the Rotonde before World War I, said, “Like all Italians Modigliani was very superstitious. It was human beings that interested him most of all and the invisible forces that were at work in them. Behind the physical appearance he imagined … a mysterious world.
“One evening we encountered a drunk on the street who was walking with great difficulty and who made contortions and was doing amazing acrobatics without ever falling. ‘Look,’ said Modigliani, ‘the evil spirits are calling to him, but he is resisting them and fighting.’ ”
Modigliani’s primitive superstitions, ones that had been handed on through the Garsins, their nurses, and home-based healers, had certainly survived. But, as Survage also observed, “Behind the physical appearance he imagined … a mysterious world.” All accounts agree that Modigliani was extremely well read. Being related, as he believed, to Spinoza led to an interest in the ideas of philosophers and psychiatrists as well as poets and painters. He could have stumbled across a theory of Arthur Schopenhauer’s on the hidden pattern behind the seemingly random event. Schopenhauer’s treatise, Jung writes, was the origin for his own article on “Synchronicity,” a term he uses to describe either a premonitory dream, vision, or premonition, or the phenomenon of similar dreams, thoughts, and ideas occurring simultaneously in different people. Such a theory of meaningful coincidence would have been as attractive to Modigliani as it was to the nineteenth-century German philosopher. Both were entranced by “the great dream of life.”
As has been noted, Eugénie, the witness of so many deaths and chaotic reversals of family fortunes, was a spiritualist, as was Rodolfo Mondolfi, her close friend and perhaps lover. Modigliani’s subsequent interest in the subject seems perfectly understandable, given his serious illnesses. He may even have had a near-death experience. It is fascinating to speculate about this particularly on the occasion when he almost died of tuberculosis, but there is no evidence one way or the other. It is known that as an adolescent he began attending séances—what Margherita dismissed as “a vulgar fantasy”—and again when he was a student in Venice. Of the earliest drawings in the Paul Alexandre collection, executed in black crayon, Chinese ink, and watercolor, one shows a woman taking part in a séance. The second depicts a male medium with a fixed gaze in the act of “Table-turning,” as Modigliani titled the sketch. Certainly his friends were well aware of his interest in the subject. One of the authors of Artist Quarter recalled that Modigliani drew him wearing “shorts, an open shirt and bare arms, with a Tirai hat on my head and the head of a hunting dog protruding between my thighs. I am practically certain he couldn’t have known that I had spent many years in Central Africa.” Beatrice Hastings, their mutual friend, “always insisted that he was a medium.”
Léopold Survage, 1935 (image credit 8.12)
Modigliani, always a great talker, tended to limit his missives to telegrammatic dimensions. Perhaps by way of compensation he was a sophisticated symbolist, adorning drawings in particular with cryptic references that might be the equivalent of a wink and a knowing nudge, or, by contrast, some quiet, obscure joke he was having at their expense. Or there might be a poem in the latest Symbolist style with oblique personal meaning, rather like the recurrence of the seated nurse theme in Salvador Dalí’s works.
One of the few such gnomic statements that have come down to us is from a 1907 sketchbook: “What I am searching for is neither the real nor the unreal, / But the Subconscious, the mystery of what is Instinctive in the Race.”
Modigliani’s watercolor of A Table-turning, or, Portrait of a Medium, in the Alexandre collection, dated 1905–06 (image credit 8.13)
It sounds like a fashionable Surrealist statement. The fact is that Modigliani was toying with such an idea ten years before the word “Surrealism” was coined by Apollinaire, and seventeen years before André Breton’s first Manifeste in 1924. Both Modigliani and those in the Dadaist and Surrealist movements were making heroic efforts to free themselves from nineteenth-century artistic convention, delving below consciousness to arrive at a new direction. They sought the liberating effects of inspired, random connections, what Breton called “Pure psychic Automatism.” They were “in open rebellion against all forms of established order, whether intellectual, moral, religious, social or artistic,” Noël Alexandre commented.
There is no doubt Modigliani, as a Socialist, was just as much in rebellion against the bourgeoisie, but he had a larger goal in mind. Survage recalled him saying, “We are building a new world using forms and colours, but the mind of the Lord will reign over it.” His goal in plumbing what Jung has called the collective unconscious was to search for spiritual insights, “the secret truth of the profound being in which he had the originality to believe.” Restellini wrote, “Behind the legend of the sole artiste maudit of the twentieth century stands a visionary artist with an extremely radical philosophical conception of his art.”
Modigliani also liked to quote d’Annunzio’s observation, “Life is a Gift: from the few to the many: from Those who Know and Have to those who neither Know nor Have.” In the category of those who knew, no one had a better appreciation of life’s fleeting beauty and terrible fragility than he did. In 1910, the night of Halley’s Comet and Modigliani’s note, Paul Alexandre’s mother, the wife of Jean-Baptiste, might just have been feeling ill. In any event she died after a short illness, in 1911. It was tuberculosis. Another shock was to overtake the Alexandres that same year. Jean showed signs of the same dreaded disease and died two years later. Noël Alexandre wrote, “Jean was nursed from the first signs of illness, in 1911, and with all the means at the disposal of a family full of doctors and pharmacists. Nothing worked. The only result was that, perhaps, his agony lasted longer.”
That Modigliani was much affected by the death of Paul Alexandre’s mother was unlikely, but Jean in danger with an affliction he knew only too well was something else. Jean, the student he had drawn and painted, who emptied his pockets for him, encouraged him, his companion and friend—Jean was as close as a brother and the Alexandres almost Modigliani’s second family. Jean’s illness continued to develop, and at some point that winter of 1912–13 it must have been clear that he could not recover. Modigliani’s tendency to panic at any threat to the collective well-being was almost reflexive, and that winter he began to show signs of distress. Brancusi dropped by one day and discovered him on the floor, unconscious beside a block of stone he was carving. Accounts conflict but it seems likely that this was the same year that the concierge at 216 boulevard Raspail found him similarly unconscious and frozen with cold. The police were obliged to climb over blocks of stone with a stretcher in order to rescue him. Another friend, Ortiz de Zárate, also called in one day and found Modigliani in a faint on the floor. He was so worried, it is said, that he took up a collection to send Modigliani back to Livorno.
Modigliani was emaciated and spitting up blood. Something of his state of mind may, perhaps, be gained from the experience of that fellow sufferer, Keats, after a coughing fit brought up blood. Keats’s friend, the artist Charles Brown, recalled one evening that Keats was examining a drop of blood on a bedsheet. “[H]e looked up into my face, with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said,—‘I know that colour of that blood;—it is arterial blood; … my death-warrant;—I must die.”
CHAPTER 9
Maldoror
[D]espair has won his soul and he wanders alone like a beggar in the alley.
—Les Chants de Maldoror
ONE LAZY AFTERNOON a government clerk named Gastone Razzaguta, who liked to call himself an artist, was sitting in the Caffè Bardi in Livorno eating a macaroon when a stranger walked in. The man, of average height, had a shaved head. Everybody knew what that meant, so Razzaguta was instantly on his guard—maybe he was an escaped convict on the run or something. If so, the man seemed very self-assured. His walk was nonchalant and Razzaguta relaxed, concluding that the man had been recently released.
But it was his outfit that commanded even more attention: black-and-white pinstriped trousers absurdly held up with a belt of string, a linen jacket, and, shockingly, a collarless shirt at a time when everybody wore high collars. Furthermore he was in urgent need of a shave, his beard was growing in white, and he looked around him in a demanding way. Where was everybody? “Is Romiti here? Natali?…” No reply. “But aren’t there any painters here?”
This photograph, much disputed, purports to show Modigliani with an uncharacteristic crew cut, posing with one of his sculptures, 1914. (image credit 9.1)
Somebody pointed at Razzaguta, whose long hair qualified him for the role. “He turned to me with a surprising but cordial invitation. ‘Let’s have a drink. Who pays?’ ” Razzaguta bought them each a glass of Pernod and made a point of noting in his memoir that he was not given a drawing in return.
It was the summer of 1913 and Modigliani was back in town. The clerk to the contrary, a shaved head did not necessarily imply a prison sentence but, more likely, a hospital stay in those days of rampant head lice. Modigliani must have spent weeks convalescing before being well enough to travel home in March. Umberto paid for the trip and Paul Alexandre, at 13 avenue Malakoff in Paris, stored Modigliani’s valuables. These included the majority of his finished sculptures and a precious selection of drawings, studies for new sculptures. There remained a single head, a particular favorite, that had been left in the studio of the “Serbo-Croat,” a joking reference to Brancusi. Modigliani wanted that transferred into Paul’s safekeeping as well.
Modigliani was back on his feet but still frail. Emanuele recalled, “Amedeo returned very ill, and looking like a tramp, to the horror of his poor mother. Naturally he was nursed, well fed, and brought back to a sane health.” To feel alive again was to return to work, and Dedo had a particular goal in mind. He was about to create the crowning glory of (one assumes) his Temple of Beauty, although this was not actually mentioned. The keystone, in marble, had been designed and would be achieved in the next few weeks. He was moving to a village where he would literally put up a sleeping tent. He wrote that it had “dazzling light and air of the most luminous clarity imaginable.” This may have been the year that Modigliani had his picture taken with one of his sculptural achievements. This is suggested by the fact that an undated and blurred photograph purports to show him, however indistinctly, with very short hair. One of his heads emerges from a block of stone. It is on a plinth; the author stands in the background. In the days when rich food and plenty of it was the only real defense against the ravages of tuberculosis, if this is really Modigliani, he has gained weight. There is a cummerbund around his expanding waistline and a tie around his neck. Both have to have been red. His pride in his work is palpable.
If the marble piece or pieces were ever finished, there is no record. Modigliani did not take them back to Paris when he returned in the summer of 1913 and Noël Alexandre believes this marked the beginning of the end of his work as a sculptor. As for this latest relapse, Modigliani wrote early in May that he had been resuscitated once more. “Happiness,” as he wrote, “is an angel with a grave face.”
That postcard was sent a few weeks before Jean Alexandre died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six. The words may have had a double significance, not just to telegraph cautious optimism but to console his friend for what must happen soon. Heavenly messengers with Janus-like faces: the capriciousness of fate was the price to be paid for earthly happiness. That year Modigliani made another reference to a subject that was much on his mind, as seen in a statement he appended to a drawing:
Just as the snake slithers out of its skin
So you will deliver yourself from sin.
Equilibrium by means of opposite extremes
Man considered from three aspects.
Aour!
The serpent shedding its skin is a common alchemical reference and the statement itself makes most sense when seen in this context. The symbol for Mercury, which follows the second line, is a reference to fluency and transmutation, the “messenger from heaven.” To alchemists, all matter was made of three constituents: mercury, sulphur, and salt; matter, being unique and universal, was one in three. The mystical importance of the number three is reinforced by the sign of the triangle. As for the six-pointed star, alchemists considered there to be four theoretical elements
, earth, air, fire, and water, and this was the symbol. “But to go further and attempt to understand the meaning of the words—the new skin of the serpent, the deliverance from sin—it is necessary to consider the ultimate goal of alchemy … to obtain the Red Elixir … or philosopher’s stone which (turns) all base metals … into gold,” Alexandre continues. After numerous complicated procedures the philosopher’s stone would reach albification, or whitening, comparable to resurrection after death. “Aour!,” a corruption of the Hebrew word meaning light, would seem to be a reference to trial by fire, the necessary purification, without which “the Great Work is impossible.” Or, in the poetic terms Keats used to express his own hopes for rebirth, “But, when I am consumed in the fire, / Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.”
Among the habitués of the Rotonde was Ossip Zadkine, son of a Russian university professor who left Smolensk at the age of sixteen to study art in London, became a sculptor, and moved into La Ruche. He met Modigliani in the autumn after the latter returned from Livorno. Modigliani was wearing a handsome gray velvet suit and the sculptor took immediate notice of the leonine head, the distinctive features, high forehead, alabaster skin, and shining, jet-black hair. Modigliani “looked like a young god disguised as a workman out in his Sunday best.” Zadkine, mentally modeling, noticed that his “clean-shaven chin had a small cleft in it.” Modigliani’s smile was delightful, and he began talking immediately about sculpture and the advantage of direct carving in stone. They first met on the boulevard Saint-Michel and again at the Rotonde. Modigliani had left his canvases somewhere at the Cité Falguière and his sculptures were back in the old greenhouse he called a studio at 216 boulevard Raspail. He invited Zadkine to come and see them.
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