Why the long face?

Modigliani lived a chaotic, impoverished and short life and his work reveals an idiosyncratic approach to painting and sculpture EXHIBITION OF THE WEEK MODIGLIANI Tate Modern, SE1

WHAT a great show of inventive work by an artist who had an intense, shockingly short life. There are more than 100 objects. If there’s a single artistic issue to get to grips with it’s Amedeo Modigliani’s interest in shape-making. Yes, he pictured people: his friends, patrons, poets and artists he knew, as well as lovers and paid models. And the results represent a vivid snapshot of a particular artistic corner of Paris during the 1910s, a rich time for art. But documenting this milieu is never the point, fascinating as this aspect might be. The pleasure instead is the constantly lively and experimental ways he puts a picture together.

The look is well known but based on surprise from work to work. A face breaks up into lines and dots, abstract curves and rectangles. A black hat brim is a giant version of a woman’s eyes. Lines that make up bits of writing on the canvas jostle and dance with lines denoting a necklace or the side of a window.

The story of Modigliani’s life is pure romantic bohemian. He died in 1920 at the age of 35 from tuberculosis, he worked intensely, lived in dreadful poverty, had many lovers, fathered several children, smoked dope and was an alco- holic. He never sought medical help. He just rotted away physically. He seems to have believed he was doing something important with his art and nothing else mattered. The day after he died, with all his teeth by now dropped out, his lover Jeanne Hébuterne, eight-months pregnant with their second child, committed suicide by throwing herself from a fifthfloor window. He was irresponsible, you might say.

Where did the look of his art come from exactly? He made sculpture alone for a couple of years and he found his painting style from the 27 heads he completed (many are here in a fantastic display). He always sought out geometric and semigeometric shapes in the forms of the sitter for a painting, and emphasised and exaggerated them, emptying out the complexity of reality and ramping up patterns and linear abstract structures. Paint was applied hurriedly and decisively. The picture’s whole drama came from sudden changes in the process of its making.

A question often asked is: was he just an exploiter of the surface effects in art he was influenced by or was he great in his own right? The answer is that he is a genius synthesiser. He’s great because of his exploiting, not despite it.

In his art you see other people’s abstract ideas as if they were being regarded over his shoulder as he works on pictures of his everyday world. The flattened space of Picasso, Cézanne’s busy surfaces and the geometric simplicity of Brâncusi. You can also see the glowing light of Renaissance painting, the stylised faces and forms of medieval religious icons and tribal art’s extreme distortions away from naturalism. But whether it’s his contemporaries, the artists he knew personally and whose portraits he sometimes painted, or the achievements of history he saw in the Paris museums, all this other stuff is sampled with constant vigour and energy, and genuine sweetness.

The centre of the exhibition is comprised of 12 large nudes painted as commissions for male clients. The bodies are laid out glowing against dark grounds, nipples beautifully painted with little darting smudges of pink and orange, pubic and armpit hair shown in all sorts of intriguing variety, sometimes peeping out if it’s a turned-away figure, in a blushing smudge at the top of the thighs beneath a rosy bottom — you could practically puke from so much unctuous appeal to the unashamed male gaze.

To make it worse — it might seem — you see heads painted in a modern-art simplified way, stuck unconvincingly on bodies that have been modelled with highlights and shading to look as pneumatic as possible. Bodies appear detached from the beds and sofas they are supposed to be lying on and the surrounding space they are supposed to be occupying. But in that very unconvincingness, the interest of the nudes as art — rather than knick-knacks for leering philistines — starts to become apparent.

The soft-porn aspect of the nudes never entirely disappears. There is an inescapably absurd cheesecake element. But they can’t be seen only as that. As with his entire output — and this is the biggest showing of his work ever in the UK so you are getting a very good picture of what Modigliani was capable of — the nudes are rich in other visual dimensions besides just imagery (or what is depicted). They are arrangements of shapes and spaces, surprising surfaces and scratchy and scrubbed paintwork contrasted with thin, black, elegant lines that stop and start.

The catalogue for the show is right to point out that the nudes’