New dawn for art’s hopeless romantic
Exhibition Modigliani Tate Modern, London
Few artists have suffered such a dramatic reversal in their critical fortunes as Amedeo Modigliani. The Paris-based Italian painter’s status as art’s ultimate beautiful, starving-in-a-garret loser can hardly be contested – dying in penury of drug- and alcoholaggravated tuberculosis aged just 35, his lover killing herself and their unborn child just days later. Yet Modigliani’s stylised, instantly recognisable portraits and nudes with long necks and lustrous dark eyes, once regarded as among the most powerful and emotive images of the 20th century, barely figure in serious tellings of the story of modern art.
This is because the revival of interest in classic modernism over the past couple of decades – white cube architecture as well as severe abstraction – has seen the more romantic side of modern art, typified by Modigliani, and that other oncegreat, but now derided figure Marc Chagall, written off as mannered and essentially soft-centred.
The people at Tate seem out to remedy this situation, and are clearly anticipating a major success with this, the largest Modigliani exhibition ever mounted in the UK. The usually dry wall texts have a novelettish breathlessness (“Paris offered excitement. Paris offered variety”), while virtual-reality headsets allow you to sit in Modigliani’s draughty studio, with rain drumming on the roof and the artist’s cigarette burning scarily low on the bench beside his palette. More significantly, the 100 works on show include many of his most famous paintings.
Born into a Jewish family in Livorno in 1884, Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906, at a moment when the likes of Picasso and Braque were shattering traditional notions of form and space under the influence of Cézanne and African art. Modigliani, a close friend of Picasso’s – and of just about everyone who mattered in Paris – fused the same elements into an approach that looks similar to Picasso’s cubism, but couldn’t be more different.
Some of the early paintings, such as The Beggar of Livorno, 1909, with its wash-like greens and blues, could pass for Cézannes. But in The Young Gypsy, from the same year, the quintessential Modigliani style appears already almost fully formed: evident in the sloping shoulders, elongated to create a column-like central form, the wide cheekbones and slanting eyes, exaggerated to enhance a sense of feral sensuality.
Modigliani, like Picasso, reduced the human face and body to essential form, but where Picasso’s cubist portraits obliterate the identity of the sitter, Modigliani is out to heighten it. In a trio of striking portraits of Paul Guillaume, his dealer, the head is refined into a kind of piggy-eyed rhomboid box with a tiny bee-stung mouth. While you might take these images as cubistic caricature, the subject is surprisingly recognisable from a photograph shown alongside.
Modigliani’s interest in creating a new kind of monumental form – far from trying to destroy it – is apparent in his brief foray into sculpture; though the roomful of Egyptian- and African-influenced female stone heads seen here feel very much of their time; like something you’d expect to see on the side of an art deco cinema.
When this exotic stylisation is transposed into painted portraits, such as Madam Pompadour (1915), the effect is mask-like and rather sub-matisse. It’s when Modigliani brings both feel and appearance vividly before us, that he comes into his own. This is evident in a wonderful room of portraits of notable figures from early modernist Paris: Jacques Lipchitz, the sculptor, in his polo-neck jumper, Gaston Modot, the artist and actor with his flat diamond-shaped eyes. Best of all is Max Jacob, the poet, whose predatory features are refined into a red-tinged, blade-like form.
These are paintings that break the cardinal rules of modernism by focusing on human content and feeling rather than pure form, and pack a powerful emotional punch. The dark-bobbed Portrait of a Girl, for example, should be easily written off as a rather mundane likeness that can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be traditional or modern. But like many of the works here, she gets under your skin on a kind of “guilty pleasure” level.
It’s with his nudes, however, that Modigliani comes unstuck: not through the near-unprecedented inclusion of pubic hair (which scandalised the public at the time), but because of the Page 3-ogling literalness of his approach to the female form. If Modigliani is said to have been a great lover of women, looking at his figures’ graphically enunciated haunches and breasts, all in the same over-heated salmon pink, you’d assume he’d never seen either before; the come-hither looks in the models’ dark eyes are frankly cringemaking.
You get the impression of an artist rushing quickly and impulsively to grasp a likeness. When it works, as in the gently smiling The Little Peasant (1918), the results have a sense of timeless rightness; when it doesn’t, as in the mopey The Italian Woman (1917), it’s best to look the other way.
Everywhere, particularly in the latter part of the show, we’re shown bad paintings – the rather amateurish La Belle Epiciere (1918) – beside good paintings – the haunting Marie (Marie, Fille du Peuple) (1917) – beside paintings which feel good and bad at the same time – such as the deceptively wishywashy Young Woman of the People – but which Modigliani somehow manages to pull off.
The show ends with a row of portraits of Jeanne Hebuterne, his last lover, though there isn’t a trace of tragedy on their sinuous arrangements of ovoid forms. While it’s surprising that Modigliani was even able to hold a paintbrush by this point, he seems to have been aiming, as in much of his work, for a quasi-classical feeling of serenity.
The fact that none of these paintings comes together as powerfully as it might, feels almost beside the point. You leave the exhibition feeling you’ve seen the best and the worst of Modigliani, and that you can’t have the one without the other. His entire art hangs on the brink of corniness, but you’re charmed into submission by paintings which, in contravention of everything we’re given to understand about how we should react to modern art, are very easy to enjoy.
Are we due for a Modigliani revival? Judging from this beguiling exhibition, we’re already having one.