Amedeo
Modigliani in Montparnasse
Click
here to visit and rent the studio furnished of Modigliani, rue de la
Grande Chaumière
Modigliani, l'artiste maudit par
excellence, au destin aussi tragique et désespéré
que celui d'un Van Gogh. Bien que contemporain des cubistes, il
ne participera jamais à ce mouvement, lui
préférant une figuration douce et primitive,
influencée par les longs masques africains. Cette stylisation
des regards, des silhouettes, signe également une forme d'Art
Déco, toujours encline à arrondir ou suggérer la
géométrie des sens.
"He was born in Livorno in July 1884. Both sides of his family were
Sephardic Jews. His father Flaminio was an unsuccessful entrepreneur
who had a small money-changing business, and his mother, Eugenia, by
far the stronger personality of the two, ran an experimental school.
Amedeo, in childhood nicknamed Dedo, was their fourth and youngest
child. Thanks largely to Eugenia Modigliani, the atmosphere of the
household was always unconventional; in 1898 the eldest son, Emmanuele,
then aged twenty-six, was sentenced to six months imprisonment as an
anarchist.
"In 1898 Modigliani began formal art training under Guglielmo Micheli,
a pupil of Giovanni Fattori, the leader of the Macchiaioli - the
Italian equivalent of the Impressionist movement. To begin with,
Modigliani's literary tastes were more advanced than his artistic ones:
his favourite poet was Lautréamont, author of Maldoror, who was
later to have immense significance for the Surrealists. He left home
and went to Florence, where in May 1902 he registered under Fattori at
the Scuola Libera di Nudo (Free School of the Nude). In March 1903 he
transferred himself to Venice, where he registered at a similar academy. There he
met two of the artists who were to be among the leaders of Futurism
Umberto Boccioni and Ardengo Soffici. More important, he had his first
real introduction to the pleasures of drugs and drink.
"In the winter of 1906 he decided to go to Paris, and his mother agreed
to give him a small allowance. The Paris which attracted him was
already fading into the past, and he seems to have been rather wary of
the new generation of experimentalists which gathered round
Apollinaire, though he did go to live in Montmartre, which was at that
time undoubtedly the focal point of the avant-garde. Thanks to French
anti-semitism (of a sort which at that time was almost unknown in his
native Italy) he discovered a much stronger sense of Jewish identity,
and his friends in the Paris art world were mainly Jewish. They
included Soutine, Kisling, the sculptor Lipchitz and the poet Max Jacob
- his one real link with the circle around Picasso. He rapidly made a
reputation for his excesses (he had a habit of stripping stark naked
when drunk), and his nickname changed from the childish Dedo to Modi (a
pun on the French maudit, or 'accursed'). In 1909 he retired for a
while to Livorno, sick and exhausted.
"When he returned, now settling in Montparnasse, the new artists'
quarter, he decided to change direction, and became a sculptor. The
master he chose was Brancusi, and there is a definite link between his
work and Brancusi's in this medium. There are also clear signs of
influence from the art from Africa and Oceania which Modigliani saw in
the Musée de l'Homme. Though he was closer to finding his
artistic direction, he was still miserably poor - his sculpture was
made mostly from stone stolen from building sites, easy to find as
Paris was then in the grip of a building boom. In 1912 he once again
fell ill, and was forced to go home for a rest. But it never seems to
have occurred to him to remain in Italy; he returned to Paris as soon
as he could.
"What stopped him carving, and led to the final phase in his work, was
the outbreak of the First World War. This brought the building boom to
an abrupt halt; Modigliani in any case was no longer feeling strong
enough for the hard physical labour of shaping blocks of stone. When he
painted it had always been directly from the motif, and now he became a
specialist in portraits whose delicate stylization showed the influence
of his period as a sculptor, and whose elegance and wit belied his
reputation for uncouth behaviour. Some of his acquaintances thought
that the uncouthness was a little cultivated - Picasso said
sarcastically: 'It's odd but you never see Modigliani drunk anywhere
but at the corners of the boulevard Montmartre and the boulevard
Raspail.'
"In the early years of the war Modigliani embarked on an affair with
the South African writer Beatrice Hastings. She was some five years
older than he was (he was now thirty), and had had a picturesque
career. One of her previous conquests had been Katherine Mansfield. She
had a little money, and Modigliani was able to live in more comfortable
circumstances. But the relationship was marked by heavy drinking and
Modigliani and Beatrice often came to blows - on one occasion he threw
her out of a window.
"From a professional point of view he was doing a little better -the
ambitious young dealer Paul Guillaume was starting to take an interest
in his work. But, as a portrait shows very clearly, Modigliani found
Guillaume's personality unsympathetic, and in 1916 he transferred his
allegiance to the Polish dealer Zborowski.
"Modigliani's affair with Beatrice Hastings was now over. He had been
doing some drawing at the Académie Colarossi, and here, in July
1917, he met Jeanne Hébuterne, who was then aged nineteen. Soon
they were living together. Their public scenes became even more famous
in Montmartre than Modigliani's rows with Beatrice. One eye-witness,
André Salmon, reports:
He was dragging her along by an arm, gripping her frail wrist, tugging
at one or another of her long braids of hair, and only letting go of
her for a moment to send her crashing against the railings of the
Luxembourg. He was like a madman, crazy with savage hatred.
"Yet some - though not all - of Modigliani's many portraits of Jeanne
show real tenderness; others show her as impassive and curiously
graceless. By early 1918 conditions in Paris had become so difficult
that Zborowski decided to move his whole stable to the South of France
- he now represented Soutine, Kisling and the Japanese artist Foujita,
as well as Modigliani. Modigliani settled obediently in Nice, but the
Mediterranean climate and landscape had no real appeal for him. He
continued to paint portraits indoors, often of local shopkeepers and
their children. In February 1918 Jeanne became pregnant, and soon
afterwards she and Modigliani separated for a while, probably because
he loathed her disapproving and overbearing mother who had also moved
South. They were reunited before the baby, a daughter, was born.
Modigliani got drunk on the way to register the child as his own, and
she remained officially fatherless, though she was later adopted by his
family in Italy. In May 1919 he returned joyfully to Paris, the only
environment he really liked. Jeanne, for the moment, was left behind,
pregnant for a second time.
"Thanks to Zborowski's efforts, Modigliani's paintings were at last
starting to fetch respectable prices. In the summer of 1919, with the
help of Osbert Sitwell, Zborowski arranged a show of French art at the
Mansard Gallery in London. It was a success, and it was one of
Modigliani's works which fetched the highest price. The purchaser was
the writer Arnold Bennett, who said that the painting reminded him of
his own heroines. In June 1919 Modigliani and Jeanne were able to move
into their first real home, an
apartment in the rue de la Grande Chaumière, immediately
above one which had once been occupied by Gauguin. But Modigliani's
health was steadily deteriorating and his alcoholic collapses were
becoming more frequent. He celebrated the New Year of 1920 in fine
style, but about a fortnight later was stricken with pains in his
kidneys and took to his bed. After some days his neighbour downstairs,
another painter called Ortiz de Zarate, called in to see if anything
was the matter. He found Modigliani delirious, complaining of a violent
headache. The bed was strewn with empty bottles and half-opened cans of
sardines which were dripping their oil on to the coverlet. Beside him
sat Jeanne, who was nearly nine months pregnant; she had not thought of
sending for a doctor. Ortiz de Zarate summoned one immediately. He
came, and declared the case was hopeless: Modigliani was suffering from
tubercular meningitis. He died on 24 January 1920, without regaining
consciousness. There was an enormous funeral, attended by the whole of
Montmartre. Jeanne, who had been taken to her parents' house, threw
herself out of a fifth floor window two days after Modigliani's death,
killing both herself and her unborn child."
Edward
Lucie-Smith, "Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists"