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.

Well north of Charleston, Gerald and Sara Murphy try a different dance on a Long Island beach, about 1915.

Though everything’s expensive in the Hamptons these days, it was (mostly) sand-cheap back when Max Ernst was banging together his iron turtle. Still, there seemed to be a high price to pay for living swell. The artists of the 1940s got away with enjoying some advance Heaven time at the leisurely seaside — they were all refugees of one sort or another, after all.

Not so Jackson Pollock, who we’ll be meeting in a bar in a Part 4. He went crazy on the beach. Gerald and Sara Murphy had craziness thrust upon them. But they only winced when they had to.

Sara fell the furthest and never complained.

The Beach Boys series: Part 1 with Max Ernst and the gang, Part 2 with other Long Island artists both older and younger.

Download my Murphys-Jackson Pollock Google Earth post.

In October 1975 about 50 people were at St Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton to say some prayers for a little old lady who’d lived in a modest house at 1113 Basil Road in McLean, Virginia, but grew up in the fanciest mansion on Long Island.

Sara Murphy had died from pneumonia the week before at the age of 91. The service at St Luke’s took place 11 years to the day of her husband Gerard’s send-off in the same church, and when it was over, Sara’s casket was interred next to his on her family’s estate, once glory-bedecked as The Dunes.

But for the boxes of keepsakes and jottings that the couple’s surviving child would have to sift through, astonishing memories were buried with them, of Hemingway and Cole Porter, Jean Cocteau, Picasso and Léger and John Dos Passos, and of course the bittersweet tang of F Scott Fitzgerald, their very good friend once, who had dedicated to them the novel that he considered his best.

“Tender Is the Night” was inspired by the Murphys, Fitzgerald said, though the caricatures he drew of them, as Dick and Nicole Diver, evolved in the course of the book into a tragically unmistakeable portrait of Scott and Zelda. Sara and Gerald didn’t grasp the psychological transference, though, and were put off. Hemingway missed it too, and bawled Scott out for screwing around with the truth. See the rest.