No one need mourn Modigliani
Something like Sting and his Police did for punk, Amedeo Modigliani made modern art, if not cubism itself, safe for home consumption, sculpting faces into razor-edged African distortions without being scary about it. The classical elegance remained evident. He was standing at cubism’s door but refused to go inside. Gregarious, likeable, handsome and a flash dresser, he got distracted and dismantled. He was consumed, and in death from consumption, he was nearly consumed by myth.
Charges of decorum seem odd when applied to someone as wrecked on booze and dope as he was. When a worried neighbour broke into his squalid Paris flat on a freezing January morning in 1920, there lay the once brash Modigliani, all of 35, about to die from tuberculosis in a bed littered with empty liquor bottles.
His mistress Jeanne Hebuterne, clearing away the stack of sardine tins, admitted she hadn’t thought to call a doctor. Amedeo, who’d been scraped up reeking from a pavement, taken to hospital and then shipped home with a shrug, died on the 24th, as if according to script. (This isn’t Jeanne, it’s “Portrait of Madame Zborowska”, from 1917.)
Two days later Jeanne threw herself out a window, nine months pregnant with their second child. It was a while before his family let her be buried next to him in the posh grave his high-office brother bought for Modi at Pere Lachaise, where hundreds of friends and admirers had gathered to see him off. See the rest.
