TRIUMPH AFTER DEATH FOR MODIGUANI
Werner, Alfred
Triumph after Death for Modigliani by ALFRED WERNER The first large Modigliani show in New England—it opened at the end of January in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and will be exhibited later in...
...Yet can they be encompassed by the circle of narrow mortals...
...From that day on he became one who must be counted among the masters of living art...
...It was in chaos...
...the important thing is that Modigliani created formal and universal beauty in perpetuating the essentials of a face or body...
...There is not much variety in Modigliani's work...
...For several years young Modigliani roamed Italy, admiring the work of the great Renaissance masters in the museums and cathedrals, and studying intermittently at the art academies of Florence and Venice...
...By contrast, Modigliani worked hard—nearly five hundred paintings, more than twenty sculptures, and thousands of watercolors and drawings are extant—although he indulged in what we might call unlimited exuberance simply because his rhythm of living was altogether different from that of other citizens...
...It took the critics many years to decide that they liked this strange man's strange art...
...One day a friend found Modigliani's atelier completely changed...
...In his foreword to the exhibition catalogue, William S. Lieberman, of New York's Museum of Modern Art (which owns three Modigliani oils, two sculptures, and several drawings), quotes from a significant letter the art student Amedeo wrote to a slightly older colleague...
...He shared with others the then (1906-10) current excitement about African Negro sculpture...
...Modigliani's three-dimensional works are generally serene and lovely...
...Hence those pensive masks, inclined slightly left or right, those two slits, green, pale blue, or black, through which they look at us listlessly, as though staring from another world...
...The mother was well-educated and assisted her husband economically with literary hackwork...
...The faces are rectangular, the mouths narrow short slits, the noses long and flat, joined in one line with the eyelids...
...Life of an artist, life of exaltations...
...At seventeen Modigliani firmly believed that the artist was a superior being: "We have rights denied to others, because our own needs are different and place us—this we must say and believe—above their moral code . . . Your real duty is to save your dream...
...Toulouse-Lautrec had painted these types only a few years before him, but while the crippled aristocrat had enjoyed showing them in all their stark degeneracy, with foul looks and wasted bodies, Modigliani, who was basically kind and warmhearted, "improved" them on canvas...
...Flaminio Modigliani and his wife, conservative middle class Jews, already had three children—Emmanuele (who was to become an eminent Socialist leader and foe of Mussolini), Margherita, and Umberto...
...My concierge and the butcher boy have no need of alcohol, especially if it does them harm...
...By now viewers, thanks to him, are familiar with the entire gallery of Latin quarter faces that passed through Paris forty-odd years ago...
...For them we must fight...
...There are portraits of famous fellow-artists and writers...
...After examining the painter's lean, feverish body, the doctor telephoned for an ambulance...
...Summoned to the hospital, Jeanne, who was expecting a second child, was insane with grief...
...But alcohol and drugs did help release the timid young man, who lacked love, friendship, and guidance, from his inhibitions so that he could proceed more rapidly toward that freedom from academic fetters he yearned for...
...They are not pretty in the ordinary sense of the word, but they evoke our pity...
...He was particularly fond of the Sunday painter, Henri Rousseau, who was still alive in 1906...
...Four decades ago, nobody wanted his work...
...There is, of course, no medical reason for suggesting that either alcohol or hashish made Modigliani "invent" the characteristic features of his mature style...
...although, like every good artist, he was both an innovator and a traditionalist...
...After he arrived in Paris, Modigliani felt that a mere geographical move was not enough—that an inner break with his past was necessary...
...This term is hardly applicable...
...It took the modest, sober, shy bourgeois boy a full year to change into the Modigliani who was to become the subject of many anecdotes and legends...
...His articles on art have appeared in a number of publications, including Commentary, The American Scholar, Chicago Jewish Forum, and the New York Post...
...Amedeo Modigliani was born in Leghorn, Italy, July 12, 1884, the son of a bankrupt businessman...
...He was a great admirer of Cezanne, whose bold distortions he emulated...
...As a "Pre-Raphaelite" sui generis, he went further away from Raphael than Dante Gabriele Rossetti, namely, to the era of Bona-ventura Berlinghieri...
...He solved it by raiding at night the sheds near a Metro station under construction...
...On January 25, 1920, Leopold Zborowski, a Polish art dealer, brought a doctor to the unheated, miserable apartment where Modigliani lived with his common-law wife, shy Jeanne Hebuterne...
...Today, everybody loves his virginal nudes—broad planes of vivid ochre, orange, burnt sienna brown, and earthy hues sharply surrounded by strong, unbroken lines...
...I shall not recount the picturesque Bohemian-isms of it nor the paradoxical and perpetual defiance of rule, nor the absence of all traces of domesticity...
...They look somewhat alike, not because Modigliani was unable to accentuate their characters (he did, in a subtle way), but because Montmartre, or Montpar-nasse, was their character...
...So what difference does it make if I give an instant of my life, if in exchange I can create a work that, perhaps, will last...
...After he died, the prices immediately doubled and trebled...
...There are many who enter "Bohemia" to live uncontrolled, carefree lives, and merely pretend that they are artists...
...But his real masters were the great Italian "primitives" of Tuscany whom he had admired in his youth, and to whom he must have turned again during his eight-months stay in Italy in 1912...
...But it is not for its mannerisms that his art has become immortal...
...One might say that Modigliani painted his friends as if he had caught them in a moment of utter fatigue, sitting in a chair alone, devoid of false glamour and artificial gaiety...
...But the mouth by Modigliani is put close under the nose and is slightly twisted upward, whereas the African craftsman would put the mouth down near the bottom of the chin...
...Tuberculosis forced him to break off his studies...
...with the aid of a friend, he stole the oak sleepers...
...When a doctor had forbidden him to work in stone, because of the dangerous dust that aggravated his severe tubercular condition, the artist turned to wood as a medium: it was easier to carry, it was softer than stone, and there were no fine particles chipped off by his tools to irritate his throat and lungs...
...Everybody gazes in fascination at the pictures' pellucid, iridescent tones which are reminiscent of Old Masters, and which Modigliani achieved by covering his thin colors with many layers of varnish...
...their hands on their laps dangle limply...
...Nor did the sunshine of Southern Italy, where Signora MoALFRED WERNER, noted art critic, has written and lectured widely in the United States and Europe...
...Alcohol, hashish, and sexual promiscuity were his means of liberating himself from his native Leghorn and all it stood for...
...He had a wooden Negro mask hanging in his studio, and when he tried his hand at sculpture, he worked in the style of that anonymous Negro master whose simplified, "abstract" manner was the delight of this anti-naturalist...
...The Renaissance reproductions that had hung on the walls had been stuffed away into a box...
...Two decades later, when he was in his mid-thirties, dissipation, fatigue, and malnutrition brought on a fatal return of the illness...
...All their energy has been pumped out...
...The studio's occupant himself had become an alcoholic and drug addict...
...What he stands for in the story of modern art was summed up most succinctly by his necrologist, the French poet, Francis Carco: "A life marked by poverty, worry, the desire to escape platitudes, by contradictions, by the wish to surpass, by thirst for punishment and the willingness to become a target for the supposedly astute...
...He regarded himself as primarily a sculptor who was forced by poverty and poor health to concentrate on painting...
...They must conserve their precious lives . . . But as for me, my life, it is important only because of what I put on my canvas...
...Little of the work he did prior to his departure for Paris in 1905 or 1906 has become known, and all of it is in the academic tradition...
...He painted chiefly single figures seated in interiors (there are also a few groups of two...
...Rousseau's directness of approach, simplicity, and economy of means are mirrored in the best of Modigliani's own work...
...these, however, create the most beautiful efforts of the soul . . . You must hold sacred all that might exalt and excite your intelligence...
...They are chiseled out of limestone and range in height from heads of twenty inches high or fewer, to a standing figure of sixty-three inches...
...Nineteen years later, when the artist died in a charity hospital, he still held firmly to this proud belief...
...Of all the frustrations suffered by Modigliani throughout his career, perhaps the worst was caused by his inability to work consistently in sculpture, the field for which he considered himself far better suited than for painting...
...Workers found her broken body on the street...
...digliani sent her son, effect a complete recovery...
...Far more important, he had also suddenly become a revolutionary in the realm of art...
...Again there was the problem of getting materials...
...He never had money to buy the necessary stones...
...Andre Salmon, the critic and poet, insists in his recent memoir of Modigliani that the painter's vices were directly responsible for his talent: "From the day he abandoned himself to certain forms of debauchery an unexpected light came upon him, transforming his art...
...His sitters also included the filles de joie who were common sights in Montmartre and Montparnasse...
...Modigliani managed to produce hundreds of works that are of lasting value...
...In their last days, the young couple had lived on a diet that consisted largely of sardines...
...The twenty-odd pieces of stone sculpture that have been definitely identified undoubtedly constitute only a small fraction of his output...
...While they are influenced by African Negro art, there are as many differences as there are similarities...
...Amedeo received a classical education in the first four grades of the local high school...
...During the artist's lifetime, his oils sold for the equivalent of twenty-five to thirty dollars—and there were few sales...
...There are a number of studies of the female nude, but there are no still-lifes, and only three or four not very important landscapes...
...We do not know precisely what caused this sudden transformation from bourgeois into a "peintre maudit" (cursed painter), nor are we sure of the exact moment — if there were one — at which it took place...
...Today, museum-goers all over the world admire his well-balanced portraits (almond-shaped ovoids connected by a cylindrical neck to the larger ovoids formed by the upper bodies with their rounded shoulders...
...he also read a good deal, and from 1898 to 1900 he studied with the best art teacher in Leghorn, a painter named Guglielmo Micheli...
...Many of them have become so popular, largely through reproductions, that many laymen quickly recognize his elegant and subtle portraits of Montmartre and Montparnasse characters, as well as his lush yet somewhat virginal nudes...
...Unfortunately, none of his wood sculptures has survived...
...In the middle of the night, she threw herself from the window of her fifth-floor room...
...A few hours later, at the Hopital de la Charite, Modigliani died—of alcohol, drugs, consumption...
...Triumph after Death for Modigliani by ALFRED WERNER The first large Modigliani show in New England—it opened at the end of January in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and will be exhibited later in Los Angeles—recalls a double tragedy that shook the artist quarter of Montparnasse forty-one years ago...
...Yet forty years later, early in 1960, one of Modigli-ani's large paintings was sold to a private collector for $175,000...
...Try to provide and multiply all such stimuli, because these alone can drive our brain to its utmost creative power...
...Beauty also demands some painful duties...
...Another witness, a minor painter who was the husband of Suzanne Valadon and stepfather of Utrillo, even claimed to know the very day on which Modigliani's metamorphosis as an artist, if not as a man, took place: "One night, at an alcohol and hashish orgy chez Pigard . . . Modigliani suddenly gave a yell and, grabbing paper and pencil, began to draw feverishly, shouting that he had found 'the way.' When he had finished he triumphantly produced a study of a woman's head and the swan neck for which he has become famous...
...Modigliani learned a great deal from such French masters as Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin, who had died only a few years before the Italian first set foot in Paris...
...In a novel, the writer Michel Georges-Michel makes Modigliani reply to a doctor who reproaches him for too much drinking: "I need a flame in order to paint, in order to be consumed by fire...
...He was treated at the local clinic, but no effective cure for the disease had been developed...
...Disturbed by their inability to pin him down in terms of a school, they resorted to calling him an eclectic...
...From the latter and his disciples Modigliani learned that one may take amazing liberties with one's line, distorting it so as to step up the dramatic intensity of expression, to bring out the inner tensions, to carry emotion to a high pitch...
...But for all that, defects and qualities, taste for unhappiness and the exceptional, the torrent of graces, the deliriousness and naughtiness, Modigliani leaves a void behind him that cannot soon be filled...
...The art world soon became aware of the loss it had suffered by Modigliani's premature death...
...Because he wanted to be free to "distort"—that is, force his own artistic vision upon reality—he decided, apparently, that he had to live the life that would, as he saw it, guarantee him the maximum of freedom...
...She was taken to her parents' home...
...he had to help himself to the material wherever he saw new buildings go up...
Vol. 25 • March 1961 • No. 3
