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? See the rest.

Francis Picabia’s “Monster”, from 1946.

The Chamba in Nigeria and Cameroon kept masks like this one well away from the village when not in use. The spirit depicted — and those who carried and wore the mask — were believed to lurk in the bush, ready to bring violence.

Modern art’s fascination early in the last century with so-called primitive art chagrined Salvador Dali to the tweezer-tips of his moustache. He was appalled that Picasso and the cubists and, worse, his fellow surrealists André Breton, Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon, could derive inspiration from “savage” artisans.

But he must have recognised the parallel. In their anguished and grotesque imagery, the surrealists in particular were evoking the same monsters of the subconscious that tribal shaman recruited for their ends.

At any rate, it’s a shame he couldn’t at least appreciate the fundamental beauty of the traditional craftsmanship of Africa, Oceania and the aboriginal Americas, whose face masks are as expressive as anything in modern art, as Modigliani well knew, being able to improve on them only by cocking an eyebrow here and there.

The only problem in absorbing this influence, I think, is the matter of ownership.

A Bamileke helmet mask from Cameroon, today valued at about €15,000, represents a buffalo, an animal embodying power and courage and thus aligned with the tribe’s chief.

I’m not aware of any major controversy today over the sale of antique African carvings. The current debate seems more about the market for the “craft guns” that are used in Africa’s inter-tribal conflicts.

There are quite righteous grumblings from Southeast Asia about foreigners making off with venerable sculptures, but you don’t hear about Africans objecting to the resale of 18th-century masks at the big auction houses in Paris and New York. These masks were scooped up in the thousands by rampaging colonists who history continues to excuse en masse as “explorers”.

To be fair, of course there was an educational factor, with many of the masks and other artifacts finding their place in First World museums, the better to share the culture of faraway places. These were, however, the minority of the purloined items.

A Kanak mask on the left from New Caledonia (€50,000 to €80,000), usually used in rituals mourning the death of chiefs. Representing the chief himself, it has long hair, since it was forbidden to cut one’s hair during the period of transition from life to death.

At its side is a Lu bo bie elephant mask of the Kran tribe in Liberia (€18,000). with perforations in the resin at the ends of the eyes in which seeds were fixed. Villagers who broke the law or refused to pay a debt faced this visage with the threat that if restitution wasn’t forthcoming, the elephant would destroy his house.

I own a bronze Buddha head I picked up for a couple of dollars in Cambodia, and although it’s not remotely antique — they’re mass-cast in huge quantities for tourists — I can’t control some winces of guilt.

It was the same with a large face mask I bought in Jamaica. The carver probably lacquered it the week previous, ready for the local straw market, but you still feel like you’re absconding with a chunk of sovereign culture. See the rest.

Georgia O’Keeffe: “Untitled (Blue-headed Indian Doll)”, 1935

Playwright Robert Patrick, ex of New York, now of Los Angeles, commented not long ago on Dali House’s post about Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the artists who appears in his drama “The Beaux Arts Ball”, staged at the Big Apple’s Theater for the New City in 1983.

The photos on this page come from Robert’s Facebook page.

Here’s Georgia with model Gigi playing Marilyn Monroe.

Set in the ladies’ lounge at the Beaux Arts Ball in Paris and encompassing in one go the years 1904 to circa 1962, the play was populated by well-known women of the arts.

“It was a custom at the ball for the artists’ wives, mistresses and models to dress in their men’s styles,” Robert explains.

The curtain rises to find the women in an uproar because Picasso’s model, Jolie, has made a scene because he was paying so much attention to Gertrude Stein.

“Compassionate Mme Seurat and stern Mme Dufy, the rulers of artistic society, disagree over whether to expel Jolie from their company.

“Nervous Mme Matisse and shocked Mrs NC Wyeth side with Mme Dufy, artists Mary Cassatt and Suzanne Valadon support Mme Seurat. Brancusi’s ambitious model, Constance, and Duchamp’s discarded male model, Rose, observe wryly.

Above, Missuses Seurat, Wyeth and Cassatt. See the rest.

Future Picassos or Modiglianis on the assembly line? No, sardine eggs photographed by Richard Kirby of Britain’s Royal Society.

Part 1 of this post is here.

Shown above is “The Seine with the Pont de la Grande Jatte”, painted in 1887 by Vincent Van Gogh. Perhaps he’d had a go himself after hearing the fuss that Seurat had caused. Van Gogh came to Georges’ studio at the end of 1887, and then joined Seurat and Signac in hanging a few canvases at a show at the new Théâtre Libre on rue Blanche. And Vincent made a final visit to Seurat’s atelier on February 19, 1888, on his was to the train station to leave Paris forever. The next day he was in Arles.

Seurat was bound for different vistas as well, summering that year on the Normandy coast — in Le Crotoy, Honfleur and Gravelines — and painting seascapes and harbour scenes. The following February there was another Les Vingt exhibition in Brussels, and then came Madeleine Knobloch.

Seurat kept his 20-year-old working-class mistress a secret from both family and friends, moving with her into a tiny studio flat at #39 on the elegantly named Passage de l’Elysée des Beaux Arts — it’s the angled building in the middle of the image below. This road is now called rue André Antoine, after a clerk at the Paris Gas Company whose interest in the stage led him to become what some call the “Father of Modern Drama”.

Antoine (1858-1943) established the highly innovative Théâtre-Libre in the street in March 1887, before moving shop in the autumn to rue Blanche in Montparnasse, where Seurat, Signac and Van Gogh helped him “decorate”. Interestingly, 39 rue du Passage de l’Elysée des Beaux-Arts was also Modigliani’s address in 1910 and 1911, but then he did move around a lot.

At this domicile on February 16, 1890, Madeleine gave birth to a son, called Pierre-Georges in a mirror image of his father’s name. Later that year Seurat exhibited just one painting, “Young Woman Powdering Herself”, but he didn’t let on that it was a portrait of his lover. See the rest.