Dali House

One hundred years ago Amedeo Modigliani painted “Beggar Woman”. He’d only been in Paris a short time and had done his share of scrounging too.

Seen up close, the oil looks as though it’s gone begging as well, which won’t sit will with collectors, who have of late been willing to part with a routine $6 million for a Modigliani (in good condition) and as much as $30 million if it’s really got something to say for itself.

Don’t expect “Beggar Woman” to climb that social ladder, but surely she’s got something to say behind the scars of a century’s neglect.

Modigliani turned 25 in 1909, but he was still a poke-about adolescent in Paris, fresh off the train just three years before. He still hadn’t found his way out of the sticky goo of bohemian chaos, swapping Toulouse-Lautrec for Cezanne and then being talked into Africanesque chisel-work.

The son of a money-changer who’d lost all his money, sickly since childhood, fond of hashish, in 1906 Modigliani nevertheless had gusto to go, and rolled up in Montmartre spewing lines from Nietzsche, Dante and Lautreamont’s “Les Chants de Maldoror”, and wondering why the great Picasso dressed like a junkman.

He squatted in Le Bateau-Lavoir, a real dump, but got a nice studio in Rue Caulaincourt and tried to maintain a semblance of Venetian poshness. Fine clothes. Clean fingernails. Then he went nuts.

By 1909 the studio was a shambles, and Modigliani had shredded his old paintings and couldn’t be trusted with the new ones. He’d get drunk at parties and then get naked, afloat on absinthe and hash. Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Apollinaire and Cocteau tried not to look.

Ah, but that’s what made him a genius, said the art critic Andre Salmon, not the first and certainly not the last to sanction stimulants as the stepping stones to creative transcendence. Had Salmon met Rimbaud, do you suppose?

Still ahead for Modigliani was his affair with the married poetess Anna Akhmatova, the mentoring of Brancusi, the affair with the sexually prolific Beatrice Hastings — good for 14 portraits — and the mercenary patience of the Zborovskis, his dealer Leopold — good for six portraits — and Leo’s wife Anna (Hanka) — good for 11 portraits (plus a pair of nudes, but more about them in a moment).

Then, of course, came Jeanne Hebuterne and the lovers’ footrace to Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

But in 1909 Amadeo was already a burn-out, lurching home to Livorno in horrible shape and wondering what went wrong. The bosom of his family gave nourishing milk and he returned to Paris cleaned up, this time renting a studio in Montparnasse, a nicer part of town all round.

Evolution came fast, devolution faster. Below are seven more portraits done between 1914 and 1918 — two years before Modi’s needlessly early death. During a Modigliani exhibition in London in 2006, the Guardian’s critic, Adrian Searle, scorned him as a mere “caricaturist”. How can someone miss the point so entirely?

“Portrait of Picasso”, ca 1914-15

Picasso had by this time recognised that he and Modigliani were engaged in the same struggle to synthesise cubism, particularly as it revolutionised the portrait.

Together at the end of 1915 they showed their latest efforts at Germaine Bongard’s gallery, and then again the following July at the Salon d’Antin — by then Picasso had broken clear with “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. Modi, not yet, perhaps never.

“Portrait of Jean Cocteau”, 1917

“Resemblance is actually nothing more than a pretext that allows the painter to confirm the picture that is in his mind,” Cocteau wrote.

“It was not Modigliani who distorted and lengthened the face, who established its asymmetry, knocked out one of the eyes, elongated the neck. All of this happened in his heart.

“And this is how he drew us at the tables in the Café de la Rotonde; this is how he saw us, loved us, felt us, disagreed or fought with us,” Cocteau said, accurately if a little too sentimentally.

He took the photo here of Modi and Pablo in August 1916, on the Rotonde terrace.

“We were all subordinated to his style, to a type that he carried within himself, and he automatically looked for faces that resembled the configuration that he required.”

“Portrait de Hanka Zborowska”, 1916

From a wealthy and aristocratic Polish clan, Hanka came to Paris intending to become a teacher, met countryman Léopold Zborowski, also from a well-to-do family, and together they proceeded to be common-law poor. Art — they socialised with Chagall, Soutine, Utrillo, Zadkine, Cocteau and Max Jacob — was interesting but didn’t pay well.

“Zbo” saw Modigliani’s paintings in a show, though, and basically poached him from his dealer, Paul Guillaume, although it wouldn’t have taken much to make Guillaume give up Modi, a troublesome stewpot whose artwork refused to sell.

Zborowski paid Modigliani 20 francs a day plus materials, models, lots of booze and a quiet spot to work — the Zborowski flat in the Sunny Hôtel. Hanka’s job, apart from the requisite modelling, was to play the good cop to Zbo’s bad cop. Together they wheedled bursts of creativity out of their adopted artist and cleaned up after his bursts of craziness.

According to a biography by Pierre Sichel, Zbo was recuperating from an illness in Nice in 1916 when Hanka agreed to pose for three portraits. Modi sold two, apparently both nudes, to the local barber as soon as they were dry. The third — quite possibly the one above and in detail below — he’d promised to Hanka in payment, but someone offered to buy it while it was still wet, before she got to collect it.

In lieu of the expected modelling fee, Hanka got her husband back. She didn’t have the right papers to arrange his return from Nice in the midst of war, so Modi obliged.

Sotheby’s tried and failed to sell “Louise”, above, in 2008 for between $7 million and $10 million, though at the same auction it did score nearly $1.9 million for “Woman in the Red Hat”, painted the same year, 1917. I don’t know what made Louise so much more special to command higher rates.

“Seated Man Leaning on His Cane” was done the following year, after Modigliani had moved to Nice with the threat of the German occupation of Paris. The anonymous sitter is believed to be one of the locals, tagged on the street for a handful of coins, but he’s always amused aficionados because he looks so much like Paul Guillaume.

The price paid in 2004 for “Jeanne Hébuterne (In Front of the Door)”, on the left above, must be the record for Modi: $31,368,000. “Jeanne Hébuterne (In a Hat)”, on the right, fetched the sterling equivalent of $26.9 million two years later.

Both portraits were done in 1919. Within a few months both artist and subject were dead, within two days of each other.

Jeanne was all of 19 when she met Modigliani in the summer of 1917 at a life-drawing class at the Académie Colarossi. She too was an artist, it’s often forgotten. Her charcoal sketch “Portrait of Modigliani with a Pipe” was sold this past May for the very unsentimental sum of $17,048.