Exhibition
Modigliani was a mass of contradictions, finds Laura Gascoigne
When planning a taboobreaking exhibition, don’t choose a venue opposite a police station. That was the lesson learned by Amedeo Modigliani’s dealer Léopold Zborowski when, in December 1917, he hung four of the artist’s nudes in the window of Galerie Berthe Weill in the Rue Lafitte, Paris, attracting a visit from the police commissioner, who then demanded their removal.
Surrounded by the six Modigliani nudes in Tate Modern’s exhibition, one can guess what the commissioner found shocking. Unlike the compliant nudes of French academic painting, Modigliani’s models were not shown in states of erotic abandon. They were self-possessed modern women wearing nothing but rouge and that—rather than the pubic hair to which the commissioner objected—was the problem.
‘They were self-possessed modern women wearing nothing but rouge and that was the problem’
Born into an old ItalianJewish family in Livorno in 1884, Modigliani was, in some ways, surprisingly old-fashioned. ‘If a woman poses for you, she gives herself to you,’ he cautioned a friend in 1914 who had wanted to paint his then muse, the writer Beatrice hastings, represented in the exhibition as Madam Pompadour (1915).
hastings later described the volatile Italian as ‘a pig and a pearl’; during one drunken row, he had thrown her through a window. ‘When he wasn’t drunk, he could be a charming companion,’ said Zborowski. ‘When he was drunk, he was off his head.’
Like any eager young artist, on arrival in Paris in 1906, Modigliani had flirted with different painting styles—early portraits echo Cézanne, Lautrec and Picasso—but his first love as a student in Italy had been sculpture and, in 1912, under the influence of Constantin Brancusi, he returned to it. A room containing nine of his carved stone heads evokes the atmosphere of ‘a primitive temple’ described by Jacob epstein when he visited Modigliani’s studio at night and found a candle burning on the top of each head.
Like most of his avant-garde contemporaries, Modigliani was in thrall to ‘primitive’ art; he haunted the ethnography collections at the Trocadero and dragged an earlier lover, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, around the egyptian galleries at the
Louvre, assuring her ‘that everything else was unworthy of attention’. In an elegant line drawing of 1911, he imagined her as an Egyptian queen reclining on a bed.
In 1914, he gave up stone carving—not an ideal medium for an artist who had contracted tuberculosis in his teens—and returned to painting portraits. His choice of genre was oddly traditional for an avant-garde artist, but in art, as in life, Modigliani’s modernity was only skin deep. His Italian compatriot, the Futurist Gino Severini, accused him of having ‘too great a nostalgia for the past and too skilful a simulation of modernity’.
A simulation of modernity was enough to put off conservative patrons, although photographs show that, despite their stylistic quirks—the elongated faces, slanting eyes, pursed lips and stalk-like necks— Modigliani’s portraits of his artist and writer friends were good likenesses. Not all their subjects thought so. Jean Cocteau remarked of his portrait: ‘It doesn’t look like me, but it does look like Modigliani, which is better.’
In April 1918, after German shells began falling on Paris, Zborowski persuaded Modigliani, now in failing health, to leave for the Riviera. There, when not portraying fellow refugees from the capital, he relied on local models: La Belle Épicière (1918), with her large awkward hands plumped in her lap and peasant children who sat for a few francs. The light of the south banished the dark earth colours from his palette, letting in airy blues and greens reminiscent of Cézanne and, away from his usual circle of urban sophisticates, a new gentleness and humanity entered his work.
A series of portraits of peasant boys was inspired by Cézanne’s Boy in a Red Waistcoat, but Modigliani’s main inspiration while in the south was Jeanne Hébuterne, the young Paris art student he had fallen in love with in 1917 and who was now expecting their first child.
The six paintings in the show’s last room depicting Hébuterne— grave, clear-eyed, girlish, elegant, ethereal—are images full of light and hope. That hope was extinguished in January 1920 when, back in Paris, Modigliani succumbed to tubercular meningitis and Hébuterne, pregnant with their second child, committed suicide. Modigliani had often told the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz that he wanted to live ‘a short but intense life’. He was 35 when he fulfilled his wish. ‘Modigliani’ is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1, until April 2 (020– 7887 8888; www. tate.org.uk). A catalogue, ‘Modigliani’, edited by Simonetta Fraquelli and Nancy Ireson, is published by Tate (£25)