Meryle Secrest

by Modigliani: A Life

  The Hastings-Pina-Modigliani imbroglio complicated matters for Marie Vassilieff early in 1917. Braque, like Apollinaire, had been wounded in the head, almost lost his eyesight, and was awarded the Légion d’Honneur and Croix de Guerre for gallantry. Then he, along with Léger, was invalided out of the war. He had survived when so many had died and Vassilieff was determined to give him a welcome-home party in her “cantine” on the avenue du Maine. Everyone who was anyone was being invited, including Picasso, Juan Gris, Cendrars, Matisse, and assorted wives and girlfriends; thirty-five in all. Hastings insisted on bringing Pina. Vassilieff foresaw nothing but trouble if the two lovers were in the same room, let alone breaking bread at the same table.

  Something had to be done. It seems Vassilieff routinely gave Modigliani a daily pittance of fifty centimes. He had to be told he could not come. But if he behaved himself and stayed away, he would get three francs.

  Vassilieff went to enormous trouble, finding black paper tablecloths and teaming them up with red paper napkins and white plates. Braque, wearing a laurel wreath, sat in the center of a long table. His wife, similarly garlanded, was seated opposite him. Picasso looked uncomfortable in a suit and tie. Matisse, Pina, Jacob, and others were similarly dressed, the ladies wore festive evening attire, and only Léger, in a beret, and Cendrars, his right arm gone, wearing on his head what seemed to be an upside-down basin with a handle, ignored the general trend. Matisse, holding a turkey, and Vassilieff, brandishing a knife, were in the act of carving when the door burst open. Modigliani, hair flying, arms outstretched, raced into the room followed by a sympathetic crowd. In an instant Pina was on his feet and aiming the gun.

  We know all this because Vassilieff later drew a detailed sketch of the dramatic moment. Accounts vary from then on. One has it that Pina fired a shot but missed. Vassilieff, who ought to know, does not mention a shot. She says she “seized the gun by main strength, forced [Modigliani] out of the door and he rolled down the stairs.” One wants to believe her, but given her tiny build and dwarf-like stature, one is inclined to believe that Picasso and his guest, Ortiz de Zárate, were the ones to take command of the situation. They commandeered a key, made sure Modigliani and friends were safely outside, and then locked the door. The incident should have ruined the party but did not. After a satisfying meal, Vassilieff performed her Cossack dance. Max Jacob did his crowd-pleasing impersonations, and the other guests danced until dawn. Presumably, Hastings and Pina held hands in a corner. Modigliani did not get his three francs. But by then he had already found the last great love of his life.

  Vassilieff’s sketch of the night she gave a party for Braque and Modigliani appeared uninvited. From bottom left: brandishing a knife, she has depicted herself; Matisse is holding the turkey, the one-armed Blaise Cendrars is seated at Matisse’s left. Picasso, in shirt and tie, is seated next to Marcelle Braque, wearing a laurel wreath; then there is Walther Halvorsen, Léger in cap, Max Jacob, Beatrice Hastings, and her new lover, Alfredo Pina, aiming a gun at Modigliani. Braque, also in laurel wreath, looks on in dismay. Juan Gris is watching the turkey carving. The man at far right is unidentified. (image credit 11.7)

  CHAPTER 12

  “Nenette”

  Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “Experience”

  LIKE PICASSO, Modigliani fell in love with enthusiasm, drawing and painting the beloved incessantly as if the new relationship were the stimulus that would unlock some unsuspected aspect of himself. But now he also needed someone living with him. After collapsing often enough in his studio, he no longer dared live alone. He needed a special kind of person, and Beatrice had many desirable qualities: an urge to nurture, similar political convictions, a love of literature, music, and art, and, even if her ambition exceeded her grasp, a poetic approach to experience. Losing her was a serious blow, for all the reasons why they loved and misunderstood each other.

  One of the stumbling blocks was certainly her quaint notion that, even though she had succeeded in a man’s world, and was smoking, drinking, and engaging in free love, she was somehow not a feminist. No doubt she gave an old-fashioned Italian like Modigliani some very mixed messages. How could he believe her if, indeed, he found her in bed with Pina, as seems likely? Did she not understand he was being cuckolded, made a laughingstock? This to him was treachery; to her, merely annoying proof of his boring bourgeois attitudes. The fact that he immediately replaced her with Simone Thiroux, another kindhearted girl who was even more quietly desperate and promiscuous than his Beà, indicates the extent of his need for somebody just then. That affair also ended abruptly and (one guesses) for the identical reason—but in any case, it was a distraction that had served its purpose. As for the banquet, to confront Pina was a required public ritual, more style than substance. No doubt he was relieved to have been hustled safely out of the room; Pina was probably equally grateful to have been spared the necessity of firing a gun. Having closed one door Modigliani opened another, becoming absorbed by a love who would meet his needs to the letter. Or almost all.

  She was Jeannette, or Jeanne, Hébuterne, an art student whom he met at the end of 1916, that is to say, a few months before the Braque banquet. Descriptions of her painted in the last eighty years are in bare outline, hampered by her family’s, and particularly her brother André’s, refusal to talk about her. Patrice Chaplin, a British novelist and playwright, made a determined effort to uncover Jeanne’s story in the 1980s and published her findings in Into the Darkness Laughing (1990). The title is an apparent reference to Modigliani’s recklessness and its attraction for Jeanne. Chaplin managed to make contact with Frédérique Prud-Hon, daughter of Roger Wild and Germaine Labaye, both friends of Modigliani’s as well as Jeanne’s. Chaplin was allowed to read letters between Jeanne and Germaine that had been kept in a locked metal box for decades. She also believed she had uncovered another illegitimate child of Modigliani’s, a daughter, in the south of France. She met some old friends and visited the apartment in the rue de la Grande Chaumière. In the end, her portrait of Jeanne remained largely speculative, a creation of her novelistic impulses because the Hébuternes would not see her.

  However, Jeanne’s great-nephew Luc Prunet, a lawyer in Meaux, and Marc Restellini, a museum director in Paris and leading expert on Modigliani, recently collaborated on a study that was published to coincide with an exhibition in Tokyo, “Le Couple Tragique” (2007). Thanks to the release of substantial numbers of hitherto unknown drawings, paintings, photographs, postcards, and other family memorabilia, Jeanne Hébuterne emerges, not as the passive, compliant figure she has been painted, but a distinctive personality in her own right.

  Hébuterne’s family came from the area around Meaux, an important agricultural center (famous for its brie) that was established in Roman times, and with a cathedral to St. Stephen dating back to the twelfth century. Once surrounded by fields, the town, some thirty miles to the northeast of Paris, linked by commuter trains, has become something of a satellite for immigrants who cannot afford city rents. Achille, a handsome and promising young executive, moved to Paris with his wife Eudoxie and became chief accountant for a perfume house. Like department stores, parfumeries are intensely focused on presentation and novelty, always on the alert for the latest trends in art. In his photographs Achille looks very much the businessman but one with a well-hidden interest in music, sculpture, and art. He was also a passionate convert to Catholicism and, it was said, would insist on reading Pascal aloud while his wife and daughter peeled the potatoes.

  Eudoxie Anaïs Tellier, the girl he married, was not pretty but had a marked sense of style. Known as “Ocze,” she wore her black hair to her knees, and favored kimonos with bright and splashy motifs. She covered the walls of their apartment on the rue Amyot in the fifth arrondissement with paintings, fragrant logs burned in the fireplace, a cuckoo clock on a wall marked the hours and quarters, and there
was a delicious smell of citron about the place. She played the piano, accompanying herself with a repertoire of songs, painted a bit, and read poetry. A wife who flutters about in butterfly robes, sits sewing at the window, sings to her children (André was Jeanne’s senior by four years), and is artistic would have a natural appeal for a husband whose livelihood depends on the art of selling the inessential.

  They were well matched in one sense, but in another, there was friction. Georgette-Céline Hébuterne, who married André, said, “Mr. Hébuterne was rather stricter and more severe. His indulgence had its limits, and he wouldn’t stand all this arty stuff when it went too far. On the other hand [Eudoxie], in her romantic way, was very much taken with artists and their lives (she obviously didn’t at all realize just what ‘artistic life’ in Montparnasse was like at the time). This difference in attitude of course led to friction but also to a certain concealment, to hiding things from one another.”

  With her strongly marked brows, long nose, and full lips Jeanne, like her mother, could not be considered classically beautiful. Her great asset was a ravishing plunge of heavy brown hair, vibrant with red and gold highlights, which she put up in long braids, hair parted in the center and with a bandeau around her forehead. Photographs show her at the age of seventeen gravely facing the camera and looking up from under her eyelashes in a manner reminiscent of the late Princess Diana, a mixture of shy and seductive charm. She was petite, with tiny hands and feet, very much an individualist. In adolescence she began designing and making her own clothes and jewelry. She was intellectually curious and had read Nietzsche, Denys l’Aréopagite, and Léon Bloy. She played the violin expertly and was learning Russian. She had memorized by heart a poem by Ilya Ehrenburg that he had written for a much-loved granddaughter whose health was fragile: “God has many stars in his unclouded Paradise. But I only have you. Stay a little while, do not die. Please don’t die.”

  Stanislas Fumet, French essayist, poet, editor, and art critic, who was two years Jeanne’s senior, said that he and his future wife Aniouta saw Jeanne on the streets in the years leading up to World War I, long before they met her. In those days she was

  a very young girl with long tresses, always alone, whose bright-eyed, very special quality captivated us. We would make a point of encountering her in the Latin Quarter or the Luxemburg Gardens, which she crossed every day, a sketchbook under her arm. Her manner of walking, with a slow and deliberate glide, even the way she held her head, was irresistibly swanlike. Her forehead was girded around with a ribbon in Veronese green, and two large coppery plaits came down almost to her knees. She invariably wore a dress of duck egg’s blue and, on her head, the sweetest little cap in some brilliant color.

  She was enchanting; the impression was of a paradoxical beauty with the grace and equilibrium of a Grecian amphora. “Her unique appeal—perhaps her spirit—was that of a rare aquatic plant, brought to life from the alchemical fluid of some magician. As a flower, she would have been a waterlily; as a precious stone, an emerald.”

  They were eventually introduced by their joint friend Chana Orloff, who would execute a full-length sculpture of Jeanne and her signature braids. “The first time Jeanne and Aniouta went for a walk it was to talk about suicide. Aniouta has never forgotten it. Jeanne said she did not pity anyone in the world so much as those who took their own lives. ‘How very much they must suffer to be driven to that,’ she said.” She was just seventeen.

  At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 André, just twenty, handsome and self-assured, was launched on his lifelong career as an artist, mostly of landscapes in the Impressionist manner. It was not surprising that Jeanne, with her instinctive sense of color and original style, would have followed André’s lead. Her mentor was ebullient, outgoing; she was quieter and reflective. She often drew his portrait and he also painted her, although the family has never made these works public. Jeanne might have measured her words but it would be a mistake to think she was malleable. André’s diary records that she also argued regularly with an abbé her family knew. Prunet said, “Here we have a girl who, before 1918, is contradicting an abbé!” He added, “I can tell you that within her family circle she often went ‘head to head’ with her father.”

  At her best, Jeanne was gentle, affectionate, and loyal. However, whenever she believed herself overruled and misunderstood, she would become resentful and mulish. Once sufficiently wounded, she never forgave. Her work reflects this dichotomy, sometimes expansive and freeform, at other times tight and mannered.

  Family relations seem to have been, for the most part, fond and devoted. André and Jeanne had pet names for their parents, “Mémère” and Pépère,” as well as for each other—André addressed his sister as “titsoeur” and she signed herself as “Nenette.” The freedoms given to Jeanne by her parents are mentioned more than once as evidence of their unusual permissiveness. But it has to be recalled that before Frenchwomen gained the vote such social freedoms were relative. The English artist C. R. W. Nevinson, in Paris in the 1930s, wrote about

  the appalling tyranny of the average French home life. It is not even now realized in England [he wrote in 1938] how dull and miserable the existence of a woman can be in the Latin countries. My mother and I once met a young girl who was studying at the Sorbonne. Greatly daring, she had dispensed with her bonne and was trying to live a life à l’Anglaise; and the treatment she experienced and the insults which were heaped on her would simply be disbelieved in England … Today France has not changed much in correct circles. No “nice” girl can sit on a café terrasse, even with her own mother, and how relations spy on them!

  Bryher, the English author, daughter of a prominent industrialist and financier, wrote, “In 1913 women belonged in the home. My family were truly frightened of the free-thinking little monster that had emerged in their midst [herself]…It would have been the same wherever I had been born, in a cottage or a mansion, in Kent or France. Slavery may be a gentle thing but the threat of the rod is always in the master’s hand.”

  The little we know about Achille suggests that, despite his indulgences, he was in most respects a man of his times and a literalist where his religious convictions were concerned, something Jeanne at least found increasingly tiresome. He was the figure around whom family life clearly revolved and Eudoxie, easily intimidated and evasive, accepted her role. Her solution when confronted was to improvise. Jeanne was similarly constrained to passive defiance, at least until she found her protector in Modigliani.

  An indication of how Jeanne Hébuterne might have felt about herself is provided by a series of drawings she made in 1915, just before she met Modigliani, to illustrate a best-selling novel, Jours de famine et misère. This is actually a memoir by its author, Neel Doff, thinly disguised, a Belgian author who had, as a child, struggled to overcome starvation and degradation. Her feckless parents, often unable to feed their nine children, drifted from one town to another. Neel Doff became something of a substitute mother, working at menial jobs and at one time becoming a prostitute. Jeanne drew thirty-three illustrations based on excerpts from the story, which is told as a series of vignettes. They are themselves vignettes: a boy spinning a top, a girl holding a child, children coming down a staircase, a nun, a weeping woman. Their execution is compact, enclosed, and curiously detached in feeling. It is as if she were describing herself, but from a very great distance. Still, the penultimate illustration accompanies the sentence, “Alone I raged and cried, squatting on the ancient sofa which served me as a bed.” The artist had certainly never been hungry in that pretty, comfortable apartment on the rue Amyot. But there must have been moments when she could identify with the heroine of Neel Doff’s novel, miserably unhappy and with a panicky feeling of being alone in a hostile world, a feeling that, once encountered, is never forgotten. Something had happened to turn a normal child with an eager smile into an unsmiling, almost unreachable adolescent. Why was she drawn, as Marc Restellini writes in Le Silence éternel, to this harrowing story
about “the destruction of the Self”?

  A further puzzle is posed by some almost clinical drawings of herself in the nude. Could a premature sexual initiation have taken place? One cannot know. Nor does one know how much importance to place, if any, on the comment by Foujita, the Japanese artist and member of the School of Paris, who knew her and dismissed her as “vicieuse et sensuelle.” Someone from a society like his own would be bound to think of an independent-minded girl in such terms. On the other hand, that there were some stifled resentments under the surface seems undeniable. The artist painted such feelings in glowering self-portraits.

  For Modigliani, a quasi-Bohemian who, as Nevinson observed, should have been the head of a bourgeois family, Jeanne Hébuterne, adorably young, inexperienced, impressionable, and plainly talented, would have seemed irresistible. This was the kind of girl one married: discreet, loyal, and quietly deferential, with an unsuspected streak of independent thought and creative accomplishment. As for Jeanne, André had been in the army for two years and she had lost her mentor. Modigliani, as handsome in his dark way as André was in his, had it all. He was a master of his chosen profession. He was charming and gifted, ardent and poetic. He was known everywhere. He knew how to survive on nothing a year. He more than filled the gap in her life.

  As for Jeanne, she was all the things he was not: able to manage a household, go on errands, and balance the budget, concealing, behind her self-effacing manner, a quiet dependability. She was young, strong, and had not yet fashioned those complicated connections with other men that can have such disastrous consequences. Those who saw them together agree that Jeanne presented a singularly interesting appearance and that she sat quietly in the background while he did his star turn, holding his hand. The hand holding is a tiny clue suggesting he had transferred to her that absolute need for loving support that would become essential in the months to come. A few, like Fumet and Dr. Dyre Diriks, a friend of Simone’s, sensed the inner resolve behind the stillness. Both she and Modigliani had secrets to hide. Was this part of their bond?