Meryle Secrest

by Modigliani: A Life

  Guillaume is a reliable witness, and his suggestion that Hastings played a supportive, if not sheltering, role is persuasive. She had nurtured other artistic careers, after all. Her New Age diary shows, time and again, her concern for the helpless. The routine spectacle of horses being beaten, of injured animals, her tolerance for a thieving rat, even her description of a wasp she was nursing back to health: these incidents demonstrate her response to those in need. And Modigliani was very needy indeed. At the start of her Paris columns she refers indignantly to the misery all around her. “But, you know, it isn’t all gay in Paris. There are horrible things. I find even more insupportable than the fact of a charlatan like Tagore getting the Nobel prize the sight of artists surrounded with all the refinements which money cannot buy, but unable to purchase the materials for their work.”

  She made her first trip back to London in July and wrote a column about it. “Modigliani, by the way, was very much [in evidence] when I was coming away. He arrested [stopped] the taxi as it was crossing the Boulevard Montparnasse and implored to be allowed to ride with me … But I didn’t know what to do with him on the station when he fainted loudly against the grubby side of the carriage and all the English stared at me. I had to keep calm because, if I get cross, I can’t remember my French … But all this while the English were staring at me and Modigliani was gasping, ‘Oh, Madame, don’t go!’ ” With war imminent, it would be natural for him to fear he might not see her again. But the episode of fainting—if Hastings does not exaggerate—suggests something more. A few months earlier, Modigliani had, by accident or design, almost walked into the path of a tram. Since then he had found an enthusiastic supporter in this unlikely person, who was taking him up and making him her personal cause. Did he fear what might happen to him if he never saw her again?

  It was the week before Austria declared war on Serbia. “Women should have nothing to do with war but to speak against it,” Hastings wrote. Modigliani may have told friends that he volunteered. But his fear of discovery and the fact that, as an Italian citizen, he was still technically neutral, makes that unlikely. In any case, this particular war did not interest him much. His attitude seems, on the face of it, hard to explain, even though, as Kenneth Clark observed, “great artists seldom take any interest in the events of the outside world. They are occupied in realising their own images and achieving formal necessities.” There was a further reason. Giuseppe Emanuele, who kept in close touch and was primarily responsible for supporting Dedo financially all these years, was a pacifist, therefore completely opposed to entering the war. “He was thus a target for the interventionists, becoming one of the most widely detested exponents of what was known as antipatriotic ‘defeatism,’ ” his biographer, Donatella Cherubini, wrote. His view was that “[t]he war had been brought about by the colonialist, protectionist and imperialist aspirations of the European industrial class, which overthrew the existing order in the name of its own interests.” G. E. Modigliani himself wrote, “[W]e are witnessing a war between England and Germany for predominance in Europe.” To think any good would come from it was “mere folly.” If Mené refused to take sides, Dedo would not either. For her part, Beatrice stoutly averred that decent women should also refuse to take part. They were both Socialists. They would sit this one out. Despite the pleas of Orage to stay in England for her own safety, Hastings went back to Paris. She arrived a matter of days before England declared war on Germany.

  Paris, as Colin Jones writes in his inimitable history of the city, being closer to the front than any other capital city in Europe, was in the path of immediate danger as soon as war was declared. By early September the Germans had raced through Belgium and were within fifty miles of the capital. General Gallieni, in command, attacked the German advance at the Battle of the Marne, and sounds of the heavy artillery fire could be heard in Paris. At the same time General Goffrey, bringing up the rear, attacked the weak flank of the German advance. That was the moment when Gallieni requisitioned every taxicab in Paris to get four thousand men to the front. Thanks to these efforts the German advance was halted. By Christmas of 1914, the war had become focused on vast networks of trenches stretching from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier.

  Having a drink with the troops during World War I (image credit 10.3)

  Jones wrote, “Many artisans’ shops and small businesses closed down altogether, while the flight of capital and the relocation of non-combatants out of the city caused a slump in demand for many manufactured goods. Most museums closed and the Grand Palais became a military hospital. In the early years inflation hit very hard … Sugar and coal were the first to be rationed and bread followed.” There was coffee without milk in the cafés, and no croissants for the duration.

  The months of what would be called the Siege of Paris became Alice Morning’s, or Minnie Pinnikin’s, or Beatrice Hastings’s, finest hour. The tone of archly frivolous chatter vanished, replaced by a straightforward, sober account of what was happening. Her “Siege Diary,” as she called it, began with some sardines, bad rice, and sixteen eggs in the pantry and that was all. Two days later she could report, “Money is a little easier. I managed to change a 50-franc note after three days’ vain flourishing of it. But prices of things are ruinous.” On about the 5th of August she waited for hours in queues for the required permit to allow her to remain in France but, in the end, left without one. On her way home she bought three pounds of plums, thinking she would make some jam, but “there isn’t a quarter of a pound of sugar left in the district.” Food would become a daily obsession. On August 20 she wrote, “This morning very little food was delivered to the Montparnasse district, and all was snatched up at once. I got some cooked pork for a franc, an awful diet in this heat, but there was not a vegetable or fruit left. One keeps open house these days on bread and cheese … One can’t dine out here where one’s hungry acquaintances are liable to pass by. I tried it once—a very bad half-hour!”

  Their circle of friends was dwindling by the day. “People vanish, sometimes without even sending to say goodbye. A windfall in the shape of … Charles Beadle turned up yesterday and we wallowed in a prolonged literary row to get away from the war. But, after all, round we came to it. You couldn’t get away from it, even if at bottom you really had a thought for anything else. It comes closer and closer every day. In vain people ransack themselves to change the conversation, even to telling each other their life-stories. A sudden shout from the street breaks attention. You rush out to get the news.”

  Fortifications were going up around Paris and houses and buildings within the military zone were being destroyed. “The first effect of this seems to be an enormous run on fruits and vegetables which, luckily, are flooding the market just now. Everybody except me went today to see the cattle and sheep in the Bois de Boulogne. Thousands, they say, have been brought in from the fields.”

  As for the Gare du Lyon, that was overwhelmed with Parisians trying to go south, or anywhere. They arrived, “some sitting bolt upright and clutching the sides of taxis as if to push them along faster,” and all of them immobilized by mountains of luggage: household goods, mattresses, chairs…“One couldn’t help laughing to see the taxis, some with six and seven spanking trunks which the least sense of decency would have left behind, considering the common knowledge that many persons will have to wait a couple of days to get half a seat for the south … The train yesterday went out with people standing all over the corridors.”

  Beatrice Hastings, 1918 (image credit 10.4)

  There were piteous columns begging for news of relatives in the daily papers—“People seem to have lost each other all over the country”—and another obsession, the course of the war. When Gallieni won the Battle of the Marne, there was a new entry. “We have been waiting all day, more or less feverishly” for the news, she wrote. “Forty kilometres back from Paris. My blessed Montparnasse, we are saved! No cannons coming, no more bombs. Hurray for the Allies! Hurray!!!”

  It was an awful s
ight when Belgian refugees began arriving from the Mons district, “hundreds and hundreds, all wet and muddy, lost and beggared and many sick.” She went to the Gare du Montparnasse, where the Croix Vert was passing out food and drink to the lightly wounded. “The hour was slack when I arrived. There were only about fifty soldiers on the platform—but they were absolutely starving with hunger and cold. The Croix Vert had to send yesterday for doctors and nurses to give aid to some men, including an English officer, who were in danger of dying at the station from exhaustion … While I was there, three or four small convoys came, and I talked with one or two soldiers. All those on the way in were lame, halt or blind, but cheerful under sandwiches and cigarettes.” Nobody talked about the war.

  By now Modigliani’s rejection of sculpture in favor of painting was almost complete. There is some evidence for the way he felt about that subject from a conversation he and Beatrice (he called her “Beà”) had over a head she had found in the muddle of his studio and which she insisted on calling brilliant, that first winter of the war. She writes, “I routed out this head from a corner sacred to the rubbish of centuries, and was called stupid for my pains in taking it away … I am told that it was never finished, that it never will be finished, that it is not worth finishing.” But she loved it. “The whole head equably smiles in contemplation of knowledge, of madness, of grace and sensibility, of stupidity, of sensuality, of illusions and disillusions—all locked away as a matter of perpetual meditation … I will never part with it unless it be to a poet; he will find what I find and the unfortunate artist will have no choice as to his immortality.” It would be like Modigliani, faced with disbelieving laughter at his expense, to lose faith in himself, even if a few admirers like Augustus John had paid a stupefying sum for his work. As for Beà, how much he cared about her opinion is unclear, but she concludes by complaining that artists do not appreciate the value of writers, “who control the public and try to bring it to a state of culture which will offer the artists great subject for their work.”

  Beatrice Hastings, with her links to influential intellectuals, provided opportunities for other appreciative comments, as Modigliani would soon discover. Thanks to Jacob Epstein, two of Modigliani’s heads were shown in an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in the summer of 1914, along with work by Epstein himself, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Mark Gertler, Duncan Grant, Paul Nash, Walter Sickert, and Stanley Spencer, most of them destined to dominate the London scene in the years to come. Then early in 1915, Guillaume pulled his conjuror’s strings to give Modigliani his first showcase in New York. It was two years after the exhibition at the Armory, but never mind. The gallery, called the Modern, was on Fifth Avenue, and Modigliani was handsomely represented with twenty-four works, most of them drawings, but there were also a pastel, a painting, and two stone heads. Sometime in the autumn of 1914 he attracted the interest of a new collector, André Level, who began buying his work, paying between fifteen and sixty francs apiece. When one considers that Hastings had rented her apartment for sixty-five francs a month, the sums begin to look respectable by Modigliani’s modest standards. Other people, including the dressmaker Paul Poiret, began to collect. Because of the war Modigliani’s monthly stipend from Italy had dried up. But he could truthfully tell his mother that his work had begun to sell—at last.

  The return to painting had social as well as financial consequences. Basler wrote that Modigliani “was surrounded by an ever-increasing number of admirers from all over the world. Everyone wanted to be portrayed by him.” One of the first was the painter and art collector Frank Burty Haviland, who lived near Picasso in the rue Schoelcher. If only for career reasons this was a smart move. Haviland was at the very heart of the inner artistic circles, he was wealthy (his American forebears had founded an important porcelain factory in Limoges), and he was known to be generous. But for Modigliani, who was incapable of being calculating, there was a genuine friendship with this tall, fair, reserved young man, who was quietly serious about art and as fascinated by African sculpture as he was. The Haviland portrait, which Basler once owned, shows the subject in profile and the style influenced by pointillism. Flavio Fergonzi writes that “the broken and choppy brushstrokes generate a vibrant luminous effect” and the conception “is … strongly indebted to the months that Modigliani spent working on sculpture.”

  Modigliani’s second success was a portrait of Diego Rivera, the Mexican artist and revolutionary, husband of Frida Kahlo, who spent some turbulent years in Paris and with whom he briefly shared a studio. Rivera, whom he called the “Mexican cannibal,” had, according to his biographer Patrick Manham, a chronic liver condition which caused periodic fits. One of several preparatory drawings Modigliani composed for his portraits showed that he had witnessed at least one of them, because Rivera’s eyes are rolled up, leaving only the whites visible. The portrait itself, a swirl of off-whites, grays, and charcoal, is as revealing as Picasso’s was noncommittal. The small, pursed, full-lipped, fat man’s mouth, the narrowed eyes, and the enigmatic half smile, executed in a burst of whorls and scribbles, give one an immediate impression of a man as engaging as he was violently unpredictable.

  Modigliani’s portrait of Diego Rivera, 1914 (image credit 10.5)

  A sketch by Marevna of Rivera, Modigliani, and the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, during World War I (image credit 10.6)

  So many friends had left for the war. Paul Alexandre, immediately attached to an infantry battalion as a military doctor, was not released until the general demobilization in 1919. He wrote, “My regiment was wiped out several times before my eyes.” Maurice Drouard, Henri Doucet, and the sculptor Coustillier, all close friends of Alexandre, were killed. Apollinaire, who received a head wound, would die of his injuries. Léger and Braque were wounded and discharged, Jean Metzinger was gassed and Blaise Cendrars, the writer, lost an arm. As for the ever-resourceful Paul Guillaume, he was briefly mobilized and then discharged, opened and closed a couple of galleries, and was back in business by 1915. He had found a new backer, again thanks to the ministrations of Jacob: a wealthy dealer in antiquities named Joseph Altounian. Guillaume, with the field wide open, was full of energy and ideas for promoting the work of painters lucky enough to have attracted his interest.

  A dwindling band of artists—mostly foreigners—met each other in the old haunts. “The wartime lack of cohesion and direction in the art world worked to the advantage of those who had been either outside or on the fringes … before the war, creating fresh possibilities and new alliances,” Silver wrote. Basler observed,

  Just about every Montparnassian had his portrait drawn or painted by Modigliani. And there were a few who did not clink glasses with him at least once. Everyone liked him—the owner of the hotel in which he lived, his hairdresser, the people in the bistros. They all have pictures by him or pleasant memories of him, be it the female Russian painter Vassilyev, who fed him in her canteen during the war, or all the amicable topers in the quartier, or the little Burgundian sculptor X, the North African painter Z, or the Communist philosopher Rappoport, with whom Modigliani seldom saw eye to eye, or even the policeman who locked him up when he got drunk … Dear old Modigliani could not have dreamed up a better public than the one he had during the war.

  The always hospitable cafés, where “we hung about from morning to night,” became virtual living rooms. Marevna wrote,

  Where else could we go? Few of us were in the position of [Ilya] Ehrenburg, who lived in a hotel and had heat and hot water during certain hours; but then he earned the right to live like a bourgeois for part of the day by hauling crates and sacks at the [railway] station at night. Most of us were chronically short of coal and gas and had long since fed to the stove all that could be burnt; the water in our studios was frozen. After a night spent shivering under thin blankets, we would rise late and rush to the café, to be greeted by a kind smile and a “Comment ça va, mon petit?”…Then we would warm ourselves with hot coffee … read the news from
the front (perhaps the war was over!) talk about the war, about Russia, about exhibitions … But the war was always with us.

  Another essential meeting place, the “canteen” mentioned by Basler, had been started by a Russian artist, Marie Vassilieff—or Vassilyev, Vassilieva, Wassilieff—who, in 1958, was living in a retreat for painters and sculptors at Nogent-sur-Marne. She was then “old and short and solid,” her interviewer, Frederick S. Wight, wrote, “something of a dowager queen with a comfortable apartment of her own, and whatever comfort or support has come her way was no more than her due.” During World War I she worked as a nurse and conceived the idea of a restaurant cooperative in her studio. This was situated in an alley off the avenue du Maine at no. 21, now the Musée du Montparnasse. The studio was furnished “with odds and ends from the flea market, chairs and stools of different heights and sizes … and a sofa against one wall where Vassilieff slept. On the walls were paintings by Chagall and Modigliani, drawings by Picasso and Léger, and a wooden sculpture by Zadkine in the corner … In one corner, behind a curtain, was the kitchen where the cook Aurélie made food for forty-five people with only a two-burner gas range and one alcohol burner. For sixty-five centimes, one got soup, meat, vegetable, and salad or dessert … coffee or tea; wine was ten centimes extra.”