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.
Picasso (here in Modi’s 1916 painting of him) huddled in the cold with Brancusi and Derain, about to witness a fairly new phenomenon in art: death jacking up the price of a painting. There were dealers in the sombre crowd whispering, “Who’s got a Modigliani?”, and even some of the cops who’d often busted him drunk, now forming a guard of honour for him, asked about the investment possibilities.
The day Modigliani was born in Livorno, Italy, in 1884, the cops were at the door because his father had been declared bankrupt. Amedeo never did get to see much cash in his short lifetime. Some of his work he peddled for bowls of soup. Meanwhile one brother was an engineer, another a lawyer, another head of the Italian Socialist Party. The last was jailed for anarchy, but Dedo, as the clan called him, was the designated family miscreant.
He learned to sculpt in Venice before moving in 1906 to Paris, where he learned to love cognac and hashish. Fellow sot Beatrice Hastings, a poet from South Africa who wrote gossip for the London magazine The New Age, was his lover and model for a few years. She found him “a pig and a pearl”, and in the course of 14 different portraits of her, he found her less and less interesting.
After they split up, Modi became the near-death of the party at Braque’s now-infamous homecoming bash at the Musee Martparnasse. When he found out that Beatrice was there with her new lover, Modigliani, who wasn’t invited, invited himself and made a scene, prompting Hastings’ man to draw a pistol.
He dodged a bullet that time, but he loved to overturn apple carts, often becoming violent himself when soused.
Rimbaud wrote some of his best stuff when wildly intoxicated or in the throes of wondering why he had been. Between party nights, Modigliani the one-time sculptor pushed oil paint around a canvas until it formed some of the most beautiful paintings of people I’ve ever seen. This one is “Maria Daughter of the People”, from 1918.
The sculptor in him never went away. He painted most of his subjects as half-figures or busts, Titian and Ingres consciously evoked in the gentle grace of their folded hands.
In 1917 Modi met 19-year-old student Jeanne Hebuterne, who conveniently already had a long, oval face, the better to make great art with. She stares vaguely from “A Door in the Background”, not so much thoughtless by the deathbed here as she is contemplative, a tender Madonna ready to help.
In seven years, amid illness and a bit of war-dodging, Modigliani painted more than 250 oils, evolving steadily from heavily outlined forms atop sketchy backgrounds, paring down the unnecessary detail, kiltering the composition to emphasise the central subject.
In 1918 the Huns were shelling Paris, and Modi and Jeanne, by now married, fled to the French south, where she had a baby and he discovered the Provencal light and landscape that Cezanne had been raving about, and softened his palette over a healthy course of peasant life.
Crucially, he found a way to thrust his subjects foward in the composition with scant but carefully angled details and light washes of colour behind them. The results, in the two years remaining to him, would be as dramatic as he was. In his last months he painted the self-portrait at the top of this post, eyeless and distant — it was the only one he ever did.
