Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu
MODIGLIANI
Virtual reality is coming on apace, and it is used very effectively in this exhibition to recreate Amedeo Modigliani’s last studio, complete with his last cigarette smouldering beside you. Although you have looked at them a few moments before, the paintings hanging in the show’s final gallery take on a new fascination when you emerge having just seen them on the easel and stacked around the studio.
The exhibition of around a hundred paintings, drawings and sculptures is as intelligently presented as it is enjoyable. Modigliani’s strengths and weaknesses are equally shown, often hanging next door to one another.
Born in 1884, he was the precocious son of an Italian family descended from Sephardic Jews. He was well-grounded in Renaissance painting and, for a while after his move to Paris at 21, his work resembled a magpie’s nest of modernist and contemporary influences and themes – here Cézanne, there Picasso, and even, perhaps, in the drawings, I would suggest Max Beerbohm. The Self-portrait as
Pierrot, which opens the show, is not only a theme loved by Picasso, but common to other artists at the time, and the influence of African masks on Modigliani’s sculptured and painted faces was also widely felt by others.
Where he does stand apart, having found his own style, is that he retained a romantic interest in the humanity of his subjects, rather than reducing them to abstracted Cubist formulae. This warmth is why he remains popular with the public, if not so much with art historians.
His portraits are not always very good as likenesses, even many of those of his fellow artists. The Picasso here is particularly poor, and Cocteau said of his that, while it was not like him, it was like Modigliani – by which he meant, I think, like a Modigliani. An exception is the 1914 Portrait of Diego Rivera, with whom he shared a studio for a while. The Mexican muralist, although heavily bearded at the time, could, in fact, look like a member of the North Korean Kim family.
Some of the Modigliani mannerisms, such as giving sitters one walleye, if not two, and the caricaturist’s trick of outlining faces, become repetitive when seen en masse. He explained the eye to a sitter: ‘You look out at the world with one, and into yourself with the other.’
However, the famous nudes benefit greatly from being viewed together here. In reproduction, they often appear flat and featureless, all salmon pink or dingy yellow. They are not quite as formulaic, made up of circles and triangles, as one might have thought, and seen close to – we are allowed almost as close to some of them as he was when painting – there is variation, gradation and detail.
It is said that a police commissioner asked for them to be removed from Modigliani’s only lifetime one-man show, because of pubic and underarm hair. Actually, that is very tastefully done, and one wonders whether the story may not have been put about to gain publicity. This Tate show needs no such tricks to bring people in.