Meryle Secrest

by Modigliani: A Life

  Zborowski, Carco wrote, “never doubted Modigliani’s genius for one second. To help him live he would have sold his clothes, his watch, his shoes, slept outdoors in the midst of winter and would have borrowed money from anybody.” The day would come when discriminating collectors would begin buying Modiglianis. “Meanwhile they would not listen to Zborowski, they laughed in his face, or else they did not receive him, offended that anyone should try to mock them in that way. Zborowski did not mind. He would leave the painting, come back, and talk, and talk.”

  Zborowski’s refusal to take no for an answer puts one in mind of the great international art dealer Joseph Duveen. He was similarly immune to insults, never lost his sense of humor, and was capable of reducing hard-headed businessmen to such a state that they would buy anything just to get rid of him. Among the collectors Zborowski successfully introduced to Modigliani was Jonas, or Jones, Netter, who represented some of the best-known French manufacturers in an import-export business. Gérard Netter, his son, believed that his father became a sophisticated collector entirely by accident. “One day someone took him to Zborowski’s, somewhere in the outskirts of Paris, and when my father saw two Utrillos and a Modigliani hanging in his salon he bought them immediately. It was a ‘coup de foudre,’ ” Gérard Netter said. “He kept going back to Zborowski’s and ended up buying the whole School of Paris.” Relations between the two men did not always run smoothly. One was inclined to believe this poet and charmer, who had such extraordinary taste, because “he was an extremely attractive, seductive personality who said he was a Polish nobleman (I’m not at all sure he was noble, but he certainly was Polish).” Zborowski turned the full force of his charm on Netter, persuading him to become a financial backer of his enterprise, and kept breaking his contracts, most of which were verbal, at least at first. Gérard Netter recalled one time when Zborowski went to call on his father, and his father, enraged, would not let him in. Then Zborowski said, “Monsieur Netter, I cannot live without you. I love you!” and Jones Netter relented. “That very same day Zborowski began to cheat him again.”

  Roger Dutilleul is another major figure, a businessman in cement with the soul of an aesthete whose instinct to buy avant-garde artists began in 1907 when, being young, he had barely any money. Eventually he would own so many works that they were plastered all over the walls, stacked up around the rooms, and under the beds—he lived with his brother, a print collector, and never married. Between 1918 and 1925, thirty-four of Modigliani’s paintings and twenty-one of his drawings went through Dutilleul’s hands.

  In a 1948 interview, Dutilleul said that early in his collecting career he bought a painting by Braque from Berthe Weill for a hundred francs. But most of all, he visited Picasso’s agent, Kahnweiler, who had opened a boutique when he was just twenty-one. “Sensitive and intelligent, he and I would have long conversations and he encouraged me in my emerging tastes. He was the one who introduced me to Picasso, Gris and Marcoussis. In effect, I became his disciple.” Kahnweiler wrote that Dutilleul was “(t)he quintessential French haut bourgeois, very enlightened, very fastidious, belonging to a vanished era but profoundly sympathetic.

  In those days, Dutilleul continued, anyone in Paris with a bit of taste and flair could find bargains. That is how I came to add drawings by Daumier and Corot to my collection, which were an even better buy than contemporary works; just before the war I bought a study by Corot, unsigned, for 175 francs. And I found a very pretty little ceramic piece by Rouault on the quays for thirty francs.

  My contacts with Modigliani began in the same way. I had seen one or two of his paintings in the window of Paul Guillaume’s and a bit later, visiting the gallery Lepoutre, I was offered one of his canvases for a hundred francs, which I accepted enthusiastically. I bought a great many from Zborowski, right up to the day when, having nothing to sell, he suggested that Modigliani paint my portrait. [In 1918] I accepted with some reservations and Modigliani came to see me. As he stood looking at my canvasses by Picasso and Braque, he was agonized. He said, “I am ten years behind them,” and I had a lot of trouble convincing him this was not so.

  He finished the painting in three weeks, very glad not to have to go looking for a model. I paid Zborowski five hundred francs. He divided the sum into five parts, three for him and his numerous relations, one for his associate and, finally, one [a hundred francs] for the painter!

  Nevertheless one has to recognize that dealers did this generation of painters an enormous service. I saw my first Chagall at Berthe Weill’s; my Légers at Rosenberg’s. Dealers smoothed our path, helped educate our tastes and also, one forgets how many financial risks they took, what kind of investment they had in hundreds of pictures in their storerooms.

  I have lived now for many years with this collection from which I was never parted and which I have succeeded in enriching a little. The experience has taught me how much painting, especially at difficult moments of my life, and in the silence of an empty room, can be an inspiration, an escape.

  In the days when Zborowski was trying to support both Modigliani and Soutine he was often reduced to selling whatever he could lay his hands on, as was attested to by Lunia Czechowska, one of the few reliable observers of Modigliani’s last years. In a lengthy account written in 1958 she recalled that, when her husband was drafted, she moved in with Hanka and Zbo on the rue Joseph Bara. She therefore saw at first hand their daily struggles to make ends meet and took part herself. Since she almost certainly knew of Modigliani’s illness, Zbo would have known of it himself. This might explain the heroic efforts the dealer undertook to keep him in funds and under daily surveillance in his own dining room.

  As for Jeanne Hébuterne there is no way of knowing whether she had guessed, or been told, that Modigliani was consumptive. But given her ability to keep secrets one can safely assume she would never have revealed a fact he was at such pains to conceal himself. She would have deferred to him in any event as her mentor and lover. Indenbaum, who was interviewed by John Olliver for Pierre Sichel’s biography, said, “Modi was just everything to her: father, brother, husband, fiancé…Modi with his arm around Jeanne’s shoulders is a typical scene: he protected her, she felt ‘à l’abri,’ sheltered in his arms, and just looked up at him in a silent and ecstatic worship.” Indenbaum recalled one evening, around two a.m., when Modigliani had thrown the usual chairs and wineglasses around at a café. “Well, after such a row he would find himself on the sidewalk, and would go to a bench and sit down. Jeanne would then come, sit next to him and Modi would put his arm around her shoulders. And they would stay sitting like that for hours, without a word.”

  Indenbaum said that Modigliani never received friends at the rue de la Grande Chaumière. “Not that he refused to do so, but one just didn’t go ‘chez Modigliani.’ ” There are no clues to their life together but plenty of insights into the way they lived, thanks to Jeanne. Restellini wrote, “Just as Modigliani’s art does not ever reflect a single concrete reality and is situated in a kind of time vacuum, that of Jeanne, on the other hand, reflects their daily reality in quite a feminine way. The life of the couple is seen through her drawings … the surroundings in the studio, the objects standing on the table.” In one of them a drawing hangs in a frame. It is a young man with strongly marked eyebrows; could it be Dedo? There is a china bowl and pitcher on the washstand, a candelabra against the wall, a pair of gloves thrown on a table which, one notes, is covered by that bourgeois nicety, the tablecloth. Such details point to an instinct to record these humble cherished objects, to frame and capture the kind of emotion Des Grieux describes in his aria, “Adieu, notre petite table,” in Massenet’s Manon. Wherever she looked, Jeanne found subject matter for her quietly observant eye. One of her best paintings, a gouache on cardboard, shows her mother sitting before an open window. Her mother is resplendent in a yellowish-green kimono bordered with bright orange flowers. Her figure, outlined in mauve, reflects a bold background in mauve and violet. Similar adept and unexpected co
lor choices enliven three of her early still lifes and must have been one of the reasons why Modigliani found her interesting: her talent is evident. She also had gifts as a delineator, making unsparing self-portraits and repeated studies of her parents and brother André on his military leaves. Her confident line is reminiscent of Modigliani’s, with some Cubistic flourishes of her own; her paintings, never merely pretty, indicate her strength of personality. Her style is one she would have learned at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, that is to say, that of the Nabis, a late-nineteenth-century group of artists who followed Gauguin’s use of heightened colors and drastically simplified forms. How she would have developed from a young woman of promise to an artist of maturity and individuality is one of the great unanswered questions.

  However, in recent years Jeanne Hébuterne’s work has sold for handsome sums. In May 2009 two of her drawings: a self portrait, and one of Modigliani sporting a pipe, each sold at Christie’s in Paris for more than $17,000. Another drawing, this one of Jeanne by Modigliani, now in the possession of the Hébuterne Archive, sold at the same sale for $132,296. The previous December, Hébuterne’s painting of Chaim Soutine also sold at Christie’s in Paris for the surprising sum of $92,367. In the space of six months, December 2008 to May 2009, Hébuterne’s archives realized a gross of $258,759.

  In March 1918 the war again intruded on Modigliani’s world with sudden and dramatic force. The Germans had invented an enormous cannon, called “Big Bertha,” capable of sending missiles the (then preposterous) distance of 121 kilometers, or seventy-five miles. Restellini writes that two of these monstrous machines were trained on the center of Paris, specifically the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité. There is no proof that Big Bertha’s aim was ever that accurate, but no doubt that shells reached Paris. On March 23 the first round was fired at seven a.m. and fell on the Place de la République, which was central enough. Fifteen minutes later another immense shell hit the rue Charles V, then a third outside the Gare de l’Est. Another shell would hit the church of Saint-Gervais in the Marais (fourth arrondissement); the roof fell in and at least fifty people died. Before the war’s end more than 250 Parisians had been killed and another six hundred injured. A new and frightening phase had begun.

  The shelling was the prelude to a German offensive. A peace treaty had been signed with Russia and troops released from the eastern front were massing against the French lines; it was a repeat of the 1914 invasion scare. There was a third, grave danger on the horizon in the form of a particularly virulent and devastating form of influenza. Misnamed the Spanish flu, it began in the U.S. in an Army camp in Kansas that same month, March 1918. American troops brought it to Europe, and by the autumn of 1918 it had mutated into a lethal form, rivaling the Black Death in its pestilential advance. In the Paris region alone it would kill thirty thousand people; worldwide, eventually thirty million died.

  Although the really severe period of the epidemic was yet to come, the immediate danger was bad enough. Zborowski was determined to get Modigliani out of Paris. Restellini writes that Jones Netter provided the funds to take Zborowski, Hanka, Modigliani, and a group of friends that included Soutine and Foujita, to safety, that is to say, Nice and Cannes.

  Throughout the nineteenth century the worst thing an unmarried girl from a respectable family could do was to get pregnant. “Illegitimacy was scandalous,” Michelle Perrot wrote, “for it was the visible sign of an offense against virginity … hence a threat to the social order. The guilty woman and those closest to her thought of nothing but hiding the offense … Mothers often abetted their daughters in infanticide. Frequently a neighbor or even a household member would denounce the crime. Sometimes a persistent rumor was enough to attract the attention of mayor and gendarmes.” So when Eudoxie learned of Jeanne’s pregnancy her shock and horror may be taken as read. One can imagine her immediate response: the couple must marry immediately.

  On the other hand, was a penniless Italian artist sixteen years Jeanne’s senior quite the right person? She and her husband could hardly object to his being an artist, since their own son was on his way to becoming one, assuming that he survived the war. But they surely would have wanted someone more suitable in age and background, and, if possible, well off. This was the moment when nine couples out of ten who are madly in love would have married anyway. Curiously, they did not. Was Modigliani, who told Lejeune that he was not cut out for that kind of role, full of inner doubt? Was Jeanne’s mother convinced that her husband would never accept him as a son-in-law? What role, if any, did his Jewishness play, given that this was a devout Catholic family? Did Eudoxie find out about his illness? If so, was that another secret she kept from her husband?

  A photograph of Eudoxie, date unknown, gives the best insight into the feelings she must have been experiencing during this period. Her expression is set into one of chronic anxiety and dread, the kind seen on the face of a woman who is driven out of her mind by the behavior of her children. Coupled with this is her certain knowledge that she will be blamed and judged by her husband, not to mention her son. There was the prospect of telling Achille the awful news. At that point, the arrival of Big Bertha and the threatened German advance began to look like the best possible pretext to mother and daughter. They would not tell anybody. They would just leave; everyone else was leaving, after all. She would have the baby, give it up for adoption, and no one need be any the wiser. If that is what they thought. A month later, by April 23, 1918, they were in the south of France. They were gone for a year.

  As for Modigliani the last few years had taken a toll, physically and emotionally. Zadkine, who was discharged from military service in December 1917, around the time of the Berthe Weill show, met Modigliani soon after his return to Paris. “He was thin and emaciated and could no longer take much alcohol—one glass was enough to make him drunk. But he continued to sit with friends at the table and draw. Occasionally he sang in a hoarse voice; he could hardly get his breath.” For years he had been having difficulty with his teeth, something Paul Alexandre had known about years before, one of the many debilitating consequences of tuberculosis; eventually he would lose them all. But now his energy was leaving him and Zborowski was deeply concerned. A photograph taken in Nice that summer of 1918 shows a rapidly aging man with a receding hairline and deep shadows under his eyes.

  John Olliver conducted a long and penetrating interview with Léopold Survage—who was already in Nice when Modigliani arrived—noting that the latter served as consultant, drinking companion, and wiser friend. They worked together every day in Survage’s small, two-room apartment, Survage in one room and Modigliani in the other. Modigliani was often invited to dinner. According to Germaine Survage, who sat for her portrait, one of their rooms was “literally wallpapered with Modigliani’s pictures that Zborowski had lent us, hoping we could help sell them.” Her brother-in-law managed to sell one for fifty francs. They bought another which, some years later, they sold for twelve thousand francs.

  In the summer of 1918 Modigliani had a bad case of the flu—whether or not it was the Spanish variety is not clear—and was not painting much, according to Survage. Although committed to four paintings a month he was seldom able to manage more than three. He would paint a canvas during a two- or three-hour stretch, after which his energies would be exhausted. As Marc Restellini notes, some of them have the appearance of being turned out by rote but there are several examples of his best work; one, Léopold Zborowski in Cannes that was bought by Dutilleul, a portrait of a Zouave and several portraits of Jeanne Hébuterne, with her direct gaze and mass of reddish-brown hair.

  Modigliani in Cannes in 1918, with Zborowski behind him, and his host, Osterlind, in the background. Osterlind’s sister is seated. (image credit 12.3)

  Survage stated that Modigliani always brought a bottle of marc with him, a kind of brandy made from the residue of olives, grapes, or apples. After awhile, he would begin reaching for the bottle. “He worked with spirit, in fact even with rage, sp
ending a lot of physical energy. And so at the end he was usually quite tight.” Olliver added, “Survage told him he should paint landscapes and in fact he did two landscapes … The point of this was that, in Nice, it was difficult to find models. But Modi was not interested; he saw nothing in landscapes.”

  Zborowski, who returned to Paris after a short stay to try to sell some more paintings, sent him a monthly stipend of about six hundred francs, considered a handsome sum. But as soon as the money arrived Modigliani and Soutine would go off to the avenue de la Gare in Nice and start drinking. “And when he drank it took him like a madness: he used to throw his money to the soldiers, and there were always soldiers on leave in the cafés. After a few days of this, he was broke.”

  On one famous occasion Modigliani wrote to Zborowski with the news that his wallet had been stolen and he had lost his month’s allowance. Somebody’s wallet had been stolen, but it was not his. He and Survage were walking along the avenue de la Gare one day when they fell into conversation with a group of soldiers, including some Arabs. The next thing they knew, a wallet was gone—belonging to Survage. Survage was always puzzled about that.

  On another occasion Guillaume arrived in Nice. He had brought a collection of engravings which he intended to present to Renoir in the hope the great man would take him on as a dealer. In that he was not successful, but he did go for a walk along the Promenade des Anglais and he and Modigliani, along with a woman friend, were photographed by one of the commercial photographers who could always be found there. When they met again the next day Guillaume asked Modigliani to reimburse him for the pictures, which infuriated the artist. Survage commented that this penny-pinching side of Guillaume’s was one of the reasons why “they did not get on very well.”