Meryle Secrest

by Modigliani: A Life

  In Montparnasse vivant the author, Gabriel Fournier, writes that Jeanne attempted to reconcile with her parents but that the reconciliation was brief. It must have been an enormous disappointment. A self-dramatizer like Modigliani will command the attention and the quiet girl in his shadow is ignored. Yet her dilemma was, if anything, as desperate as his. If and when he died, he left her a young woman with two children. Judging by her attitude toward her first pregnancy, the second child was unlikely to have been any more wanted. She and her children had already run the considerable risk of contracting tuberculosis themselves. She would naturally want to marry. In the early spring of 1919, Modigliani wrote to tell Zborowski that his brother Emanuele was arranging for the needed legal papers and that the business was almost finished. Yet, six months later, they were still not married.

  Jeanne had no status except as a common-law wife, that is to say, none. The possibility that she would be destitute was real unless her parents took her back. Would they? Did they even know Modigliani was ill with tuberculosis? (Luc Prunet doubts they ever did.) How much would they have intervened? More to the point, how wounded had she become? Would she ever go back?

  There is a further question of how comfortable the two were with each other in the day-to-day intimacy of a close relationship. Marc Restellini, who has made a study of the final six months of Modigliani’s life, believes that, by 1919, a sense of disillusion with Jeanne can be deduced from the increasingly unflattering portraits he paints of her. A postcard he sent her while they were living separately in Nice provides a clue: “Bonjour Monstre.” The teasing tone reveals some sense of exasperation. There was something unsettling in her eerie silences, her reserve, her determination never to reveal a chink in her emotional armor. To someone with exacerbated nerves and a steadily declining health, perhaps nursing a hangover and feverish, such stoicism would seem unbearable. He wanted a Lunia at home, someone to soothe him, distract him, gloss over his tormented feelings, excuse his erratic behavior, and coax him into a good mood. In short, a maternal solicitude. But the evidence suggests that Jeanne was too much his follower, and he too dominant, to allow this to happen. She could only follow with a kind of terrible patience.

  His original response to her as a sitter had been rapturous. An early drawing, which incidentally dates their meeting to the end of 1916, if not before, has her in hat and coat, two long pigtails framing her face. Portraits, the first of many, came soon after. Although Modigliani’s stylistic simplifications are still evident (the emphasis on the nose, the endlessly attenuated neck), the early portraits and drawings give a vivid sense of the sitter. In one she is shown three-quarter face, as if in the act of turning toward the artist, her look alert and questioning. In another she is seen full face, looking directly up at the viewer with a grave, penetrating stare; in yet another, a study of her profile reveals the same look of serious-minded concentration. Jeanne Modigliani observed that “the composition becomes more flowing and takes on a calligraphic elegance; the canvas is visible between the thin brushstrokes and the color recalls the luminous freshness of a Persian miniature.” In Modigliani’s portraits of Jeanne we see her with shoulders bared only once, and only two drawings exist of her in the nude; she is dancing in the first and serves as a model for the Berthe Weill exhibition poster in the other. Since it is almost axiomatic that nude models slept with their artists, before or after, it is interesting that none of the subjects in Modigliani’s great nude paintings can be identified as Jeanne. One can speculate about the reasons why. The fact is that Jeanne had no inner inhibitions, sketching herself repeatedly in the nude as she looked into a mirror.

  In that year of 1919 the series of portraits, which have shown Jeanne in every possible permutation—hatted, bareheaded, hair up, hair down, hair short, hair long, pose natural, pose self-consciously modeled on the antique—focus increasingly on Jeanne as she grows heavily pregnant and puts on weight. The neck is still swanlike and her glorious hair still full of reddish highlights. But the nose is blunter and even more elongated, she now has a double chin and sits slumped in a chair or a bed, fat-bellied and bulging. These works verge on caricature.

  Even so there is evidence that the long-suffering Jeanne had her limits, suggested by a poem Modigliani wrote while they were living together:

  un chat se gratte la tête

  comme un poête

  qui cherche une rime

  ma femme

  pour un prêtre

  me jette un verre à la tête.

  (a cat scratches his head

  like a poet

  searching for a rhyme

  my wife

  for a priest

  throws a glass at my head.)

  Could this be an oblique reference to the marriage that never took place?

  Modigliani’s great painting, only the second self-portrait known, is considered a late work, probably in the autumn of 1919. He is posed in three-quarter face, with a palette in his right hand, his left resting on a knee. His expression is indecipherable—the art historian Sara Harrison likened it to a mask—and his eyes are narrowed, their sockets blanked out with gray. The autumnal colors of fawns, ochres, and reddish browns, the grayish-blue scarf tied around his neck, provide the elegiac proof, if such were needed, that Modigliani knew how little time was left.

  Kenneth Silver writes that the painter took from Cézanne his technique of

  thinly applied paint laid down in a repeated hatchwork; the warm/cool palette of earth and sky (or water) tones so beloved of the master from Aix; and even the characteristic and poignant tilt of the head, by which Cézanne evokes a sense of melancholy in the portraits of certain sitters. Yet it is in the tilt as well that we strongly sense Modigliani’s predilection for the Italian Renaissance and especially for the art of Botticelli, for whom the tilted head is a sign of spiritual buoyancy … Italianate too … are both the attenuated linear style and the idealization of the form, which is at the crux of Modigliani’s art.

  The perfection of form and the conundrum it posed for an art historian was one of Kenneth Clark’s recurring themes. In “Apologia of an Art Historian,” he argued that an art historian must believe in the greatness of a work before he could understand, let alone appreciate it. “I well remember a time when the Giottos in the Arena chapel meant nothing to me … But I went on looking in hope; and almost without my being aware of it, I found myself experiencing before them the same emotions which I felt in reading the plays of Shakespeare. Through some perfection of form I was enabled to share and to transcend experiences of which, in actual life, my feeble spirit would never have been capable.” The self-portrait and other works by Modigliani, with their increasing subtlety, rigor, and air of inevitability, are witnesses not only to a maturing sensibility but call up an answering echo in the viewer because they are somehow so right. Something rare has been accomplished, and the more one looks the more one finds.

  The last known photograph of Modigliani, taken in 1919, shows eyes full of a painful awareness. Yet this extraordinary man, who had days when he could hardly get out of bed, was not only painting at the height of his powers but astonishing his friends by his mental and physical resilience. Sometime during the Christmas holidays, Chantal Quenneville, a friend of Jeanne’s, ran into him at a little all-night café on the boulevard de Vaugirard near Vassilieff’s former “cantine.” He was buying a double helping of sandwiches and consuming them with relish. He explained, “Overeating—that’s the only thing that can save me.” Seeing him arrive at Zborowski’s early on New Year’s Day, so drunk he could hardly stand, clutching a bedraggled bunch of flowers, needing urgently to be put into the nearest bed, Paulette Jourdain could only marvel at his stamina. “It was astonishing how he kept up physically, in appearance, considering the amount he drank and drugged.” The received wisdom was that he drank himself to death. The reverse is the case; alcohol and drugs were the means by which he could somehow keep functioning, the necessary anesthetic, as well as hide the great secret
that must be kept at all costs.

  To casual observers like the critic Claude Roy, the feverish haste, the irritability, the rages, the search for oblivion could only mean one thing. But in the context of the truth that Modigliani kept hidden so successfully the facts appear in an entirely new light. Noël Alexandre, Paul Alexandre’s son, author of The Unknown Modigliani, said, “The popular version of Modigliani as a drunk, with women and drugs—people have invented a personality that didn’t exist. The one that did exist was so much more admirable. A man who lived his life nobly. An artist, highly original, who looked for another path, different from Picasso, from Matisse. He is unique in his genre, unique in his nobility of intent.”

  Alexandre observed that, as he died, Mozart is thought to have said, “I was just beginning to learn how to compose,” and Modigliani could have said the same, “I am beginning to learn how to paint.” He concluded, “Great artists like these go to the end of themselves, and the beauty of their work is a reflection of themselves, after all. They are courageous, to the edge of death.”

  “Feeling I would fall, I leaned against a ruined wall, and read: ‘Here lies a youth who died of consumption. You know why. Do not pray for him.’ ”

  Like most Italians Modigliani was on easy terms with cemeteries, which for him, as with other European cultures, had the quality of a theme park. Whether or not he took walks in Père Lachaise it is certainly true that he often strolled around the Montparnasse cemetery with Beà and may even have had picnics there. He took the same interest in drama and spectacle as the average Parisian flâneur whenever a particularly grand funeral cortège passed by. He thought nothing of raiding a fresh wreath whenever he needed a flower or two, his favorite offering to a pretty woman. So it is not particularly surprising that he made enthusiastic invitations to friends to go for walks in some nearby cemetery, as he did, raining or not. Whether or not he said that “he liked contemplating death” is a moot point. He certainly knew his own death was not far off.

  A more persuasive anecdote is related by André Utter, Valadon’s husband. He states that he, his wife, and friends were dining one night at Guérin’s when Modigliani joined them. He had been drinking but was not drunk and uncharacteristically subdued. He sat down beside Valadon and leaned his head on her shoulder. She was, he said, the only woman who really understood him. Then, huddling close to her, “like a child who is afraid of the dark,” he began to sing a dirge. Jeanne Modigliani, who also wrote about the incident, believed it must have been the Kaddish. This prayer is, according to Leo Rosten, an ancient doxology in Aramaic glorifying God’s name that in time became known as the Mourner’s Prayer. It is recited at the grave of the deceased for eleven months and each year on the anniversary of the death. Modigliani, in other words, was reciting a prayer for himself, mourning his own death.

  That night Modigliani stumbled his way home. Somehow he was still on his feet when he was certainly feeling the second-stage effects of tubercular meningitis, with increasing headaches plus the mental confusion which is an indication of the deadly progression of the disease. Anyone could see he was not well but, like Claude Roy, they knew why: he was drinking himself to death. Even as perceptive an observer as Indenbaum was sure of it.

  He said that he saw Modigliani a matter of days before he died. He was out and about along the rue de la Grande Chaumière at eight one morning when he heard someone behind him coughing in “a heart-rending manner.” It was Modi, who opened his arms wide; his jaw dropping with surprise and pleasure. They shook hands warmly. Indenbaum said Modi was “very pale, very pulled down and hardly recognizable.” With what was left of his voice he said he was leaving for Italy. It was too bleak and gray in Paris; he urgently needed some sun. Indenbaum believed he was destitute, but that is another common misconception. In fact, for the first time since his arrival in Paris fourteen years before he was actually making some money from his art. In addition to his stipend from Zborowski the sales percentages were rolling in regularly. The month he died he asked Louis Latourette, who was a financial reporter, for some advice about money. It is also known that he sent back the family allowance at about this time, saying he no longer needed it. One of the most painful rumors to arise, three or four years later, was that his family had abandoned him and he had died destitute. That, Eugénie wrote in her diary, was almost more than she could bear.

  What is clear is that his friends, who were by now used to shrugging off Modigliani’s exploits, ignored the warning signs. They could well have dismissed him as an alcoholic. On the other hand, they might have learned the truth at last: that he had tuberculosis. If this is so, and it is clear that Zborowski, Guillaume as well, knew what the trouble really was, the news would have spread in the small circle in Montparnasse like wildfire. This is the most plausible explanation for what happened when he was dying and for days left alone.

  Beatrice Hastings and Simone Thiroux were nowhere to be found, perhaps for understandable reasons. Moïse and Renée Kisling, who saw Modigliani on a daily basis, did not appear. No sign of Guillaume, Utter and Valadon, Lipchitz, Orloff, Jacob, Survage, Soutine, Brancusi, Zadkine, or any of the subsequent chroniclers, Latourette, Salmon, Carco, Michel Georges-Michel, and all those who would later claim to have witnessed the hourly drama of Modigliani’s final days. Zborowski and Hanka did indeed appear but, as he confessed later, did not realize that Modigliani was seriously ill because, he said in self-justification, Modi was walking, talking, and eating, apparently in the best of spirits, just before. As luck would have it, the painter Ortiz de Zárate, whom Modigliani had met in Venice, was also living at the rue de la Grande Chaumière with his family and could be relied upon to keep him supplied with coal. But he was away for a week and that was the week Modigliani got ill.

  The last photograph of Modigliani, 1919 (image credit 13.5)

  Not long before he died of cancer in 1982, David Carritt, then fifty-five, whose acumen as a London art dealer was equaled by his erudition and knowledge of the Italian Renaissance, was invited for a weekend. He apologized. He could not go, he said, because friends were about to take him on a voyage to Cythère. This poetical reference to an island off the southernmost coast of Greece, seemingly distant enough to be in another world, is a metaphor for the soul’s ultimate journey. It was celebrated by Charles Baudelaire in his poem “Un Voyage à Cythère.”

  Quelle est cette île triste et noire?—C’est Cythère,

  Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons,

  Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons.

  Regardez! Après tout c’est une pauvre terre.

  (What is that sad, dark island?—It is Cythera,

  They tell us, a country famous in song,

  Banal Eldorado of all the old bachelors.

  Look! After all, it is a poor land.)

  A voyage as a metaphor for death is so common that it is curious that commentators missed the reference in another anecdote that was told by the Vicomte de Lascano Tegui, an Italian artist acquaintance of Modigliani’s. Tegui recounts that it was a rainy night (as it always is in stories of this kind). Modigliani insisted on joining Tegui and a group of friends who were on their way across town to visit another Italian, a draughtsman. Aware that he was in no state to make the trip, they attempted to dissuade Modigliani. But, trailing an overcoat that he refused to wear, already soaked to the skin, Modigliani could not be dissuaded. So they shrugged and set off. He followed a short distance behind, muttering to himself. They realized how tenuous his hold on reality had become when he stopped in front of a thirty-six-foot monument of a lion and started cursing it as if it were alive.

  When they finally arrived at the draughtsman’s quarters they tried again to persuade Modigliani to do something he was determined not to do. At least come inside, they said. He fought them off. He sat down on the sidewalk and was still there several hours later. It was, of course, still raining. Saving such a man from himself is such a thankless task that the wonder is that anyone did anything. Ac
cording to one report, they managed to bundle him into a taxi and send him back to his studio. Accounts of the incident dismiss as mere raving what happened before he left. Modigliani explained to anyone who would listen that he was seated on a quay on the edge of a miraculous sea. There, coming toward him, was a phantom boat.

  Soon after that, perhaps the next morning, Modigliani went to bed for the last time. The legend has him dying on a filthy pallet while Jeanne, stoical to the end, sits surrounded by empty liquor bottles and opened cans of sardines, their only source of food. In other embellishments Modigliani is on a rampage, refusing food, screaming whenever visitors attempt to enter, and refusing, according to Sichel, to see a doctor out of sheer childish pettiness. No one has quite dared to give an imaginary dialogue to Jeanne, who is usually treated as if she was not there.

  The now demolished, imposing entrance on the rue Jacob, Paris, of the Hôpital de la Charité, where Modigliani died (image credit 13.6)