The mixture of fact and fancy that makes up the standard biography of Amedeo Modigliani, the Italian Jewish painter and sculptor who was one of the shining lights of the school of Paris in its halcyon days and whose reputation today looks greater than ever, here receives a thorough sifting. The results, even as summed up in the space of an article, should compel a salutary revision of our conception of this extraordinary figure.
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In Italy there exists an odd legal provision concerning the seizure of a debtor’s property; whatever else the officers of the law may impound, they cannot touch a bed in which a woman has just given birth to a child, or is about to do so. It was thanks to this that Eugenia Modigliani, wife of a bankrupt businessman, Flaminio Modigliani, enjoyed a modicum of comfort when, on July 12, 1884, she gave birth to their fourth child, Amedeo (“beloved of God”), in Leghorn (Livorno), Italy. The Modigliani family had moved into their shabby apartment only a few days before, having been forced by poverty to leave a more elegant section of the city where they had lived in the same house for over a decade. Mother and child lay underneath a mound of family possessions, piled on the bed in order to be saved from confiscation. Roaming about in the desolate rooms were three other children, Emmanuele, born 1872, Margherita, born in 1874, and Umberto, born in 1878, all of them already old enough to grasp tragedy and understand their parents’ grief.
Thus did one of the most remarkable artists of our century enter upon his life. The popular notion still has it that Amedeo Modigliani came of a wealthy family; and further misinterpretation gathered around his figure as spurious anecdotes and absurd legends about his life in Paris were put in circulation, after his death, by persons who claimed to have known him. The time is overdue to separate fact from fiction.
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To understand Modigliani’s way of life in Paris it is important to know the real background of his youth. His family was Sephardic, one of the old Jewish families of Italy, where, as in most Latin countries, Jews mixed with the Gentiles around them more generally than did the Ashkenazim in the North, and took on the appearance and behavior of their neighbors to a much greater degree. In Paris, Modigliani was usually considered a typical Italian, whereas Chagall and Soutine were regarded not as Russian or Lithuanian, but as Jews. All who met him were struck by his aristocratic bearing even amid misery and neglect, and this contributed further to the legend of his “wealthy” family.
The name Modigliani is not uncommon in Italy. It is thought to be derived from Modigliana, the name of a town near Forlì, less than a hundred miles south of Venice. Two Gentile artists, Livio and Gianfranco Modigliani, father and son, lived in this vicinity around 1600 and painted frescoes at Forlì and other places. In recent times, however, the name has belonged exclusively to Jews (in many European countries surnames taken from urban places are usually Jewish). Other outstanding Italian Jews who bear, or bore, the name are Ettore Modigliani, an art critic, Elio Modigliani, an ethnologist, and Enrico Modigliani, a pediatrician, none of whom, however, is directly related to the artist’s family. We do not know whether the latter’s forebears actually came from Modigliana, but it is quite possible, since Jewish communities can be traced in the neighborhood of Forlì as far back as the 14th century and even earlier.
Amedeo’s paternal ancestors were well off, though far less so than they have been made to appear in the various biographies of the artist. In the 19th century, far from being the “wealthy owners of zinc mines and of forests, exploiters for charcoal in northern Italy and Sardinia,” they merely held shares in zinc mines. Modigliani’s father’s father was a native of Rome, the one Italian city with a tradition of discrimination (Vatican-enforced) against Jews. But as bankers to the Pope the Modiglianis enjoyed a certain privileged status. Even so, when the Italian patriots of the Risorgimento, led by Mazzini and Garibaldi, established a democratic republic in Rome in 1848, the Modiglianis, along with most other Jews there, flocked to their support. But the republic was soon overthrown by Napoleon Ill’s French Zouaves, sent to aid the Pope, and most of the Jewish republicans of Rome followed Garibaldi’s troops in their retreat northwards.
Shortly before the end of 1849 the Modiglianis came to rest in Leghorn, in Tuscany, where Jews had for long enjoyed a relatively good status. Though still deprived of the political rights they had known for a brief space under Napoleon I, they at least “continued to enjoy their civil rights; special taxation was not reintroduced, they were still admitted to the universities, and the ghetto system was not renewed. . . . Leghorn Jewry retained, indeed, its privileged status, and in the course of the following generation was to maintain its highest level of numbers and prosperity. . . . a foreigner admitted to the community still became naturalized automatically” (Cecil Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy).
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Amedeo’S father, Flaminio Modigliani, born in Rome in 1840, was still a child when he arrived in Leghorn. It was on a trip to Marseilles, in France, that he met his future wife, Eugenia Garsin. She, of Italian Jewish origin, had been born in Marseilles in 1855 and saw Italy for the first time when she went there to be married, around the year 1870. Her family was to play a greater role than her husband’s in Amedeo’s life. Her father, Isacco (“Giacci”) Garsin, born in Leghorn in 1819, had been taken to Marseilles when his whole family moved there in 1838, and there he himself went into the export-import business, married, and raised his children. If too temperamental ever to be a great success as a merchant, he was at least a fascinating character, had traveled a great deal, knew many languages, and was interested in everything from rabbinical lore to the fine arts.
The Garsins claimed that their name was derived from the Hebrew gars, an abbreviation of geri Sinai, or “dweller of Sinai,” but it is more likely to have come from the very common name of Gershom. It is, however, an established fact that the Garsin family was connected with Spinoza through one of his sisters. As a child, the precocious Amedeo (named after his mother’s favorite brother) was called “the little philosopher,” and as an adult he loved to indulge in philosophical discussions, often proudly recalling the fact of his blood relationship with the author of the Ethics (he said once to Louis Latourrettes, “J’adore la philosophie. Je l’ai dans le sang”).
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Those graphic evocations of Jewish community life that are so conspicuous in Chagall’s canvases are entirely absent from Modigliani’s; he never knew segregation like that of the shtetl, or the kind of self-destructive bitterness that Chaim Soutine carried with him from Lithuania to Paris. Soutine grew up in direst poverty, in a small town where he suffered as a boy from his orthodox neighbors’ hostility to the arts. The case of Modigliani, who became Soutine’s closest friend in Paris, is quite different. Like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks family, the Modiglianis, as they lost their skill in business, gained in aesthetic sensibility and in morbidness. Unlike his ancestors; Amedeo did not know how to make money, but only how to spend it recklessly.
Modigliani’s Luebeck was the city of Leghorn, which, thanks to the encouragement of the Medici, had grown during the late Renaissance from a small fishing village into a rich and powerful seaport and commercial center. In 1593, Ferdinand I, Duke of Tuscany, addressing himself to “men of the East and West,” and expressly mentioning the “Hebrews,” invited entrepreneurs from all lands to come to Leghorn, which he made a free port, exempt from all fiscal restrictions, and placed outside the customs frontier of his state. Among the Jews who soon flocked there were many Sephardic merchants; they, though free to live wherever they pleased, preferred to cluster together in one central section of the city, where they began building, at the end of the 16th century, a baroque synagogue that was surpassed in size and beauty only by the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam. This “Tempio Israelitico” was unique for its mixture of orthodoxy and modernism: the women had to sit in an upper gallery separated from the men, but the interior decoration resembled that of a baroque church, and music was played on an organ. In this temple, which is still standing, Amedeo’s father attended services, but only on the High Holy Days—the family, far from religious, had no regular pew.
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In the Leghorn to which Grandfather Modigliani had fled, more or less the way Jews immigrated to the United States a few decades later, the Jewish community could look back upon a long history of complete autonomy. They did not suffer under economic restrictions; as far back as the 17th century the Medici had allowed them to carry arms and discard the yellow badge. In a period when, in papal Rome, it was against the law For a Jew to ride in a cab, many Leghorn Jews owned carriages. Since they constituted at one time as much as a quarter of the city’s population, their Christian neighbors often joined them in closing their places of business on the Sabbath. Montesquieu, who visited the place in the early part of the 18th century, found from six to seven thousand Jews who were enjoying “the particular protection of the government.” The Grand Duke often came with visiting royalty to attend the temple services. Cynics even maintained that in Leghorn it was safer to strike the Grand Duke than one of the Jewish “nation.”
By the latter part of the 19th century, however, the city’s fortunes were in decline—partly, it seems, because of the withdrawal of its free-harbor privileges. Jews and Gentiles alike suffered from the consequences. Whether because of unfavorable conditions or of an innate lack of ability—or both—Flaminio Modigliani was a business failure. A commission agent, he kept a banco (office) to which clients seldom came. The burden of providing for the family of six fell on his wife’s shoulders, and though she seemed hardly cut out for the role, she filled it nevertheless. Well educated, she gave lessons in English and French, and “ghosted” novels and literary essays in English and Italian for a wealthy dilettante. From her Amedeo inherited his good looks as well as his gifts—and perhaps his neurotic disposition too, for Grandfather Garsin was rather unstable, and a sister of Amedeo’s mother, highly intellectual and interested in politics, eventually went mad.
It is significant that his father played hardly any except a negative role in Amedeo’s life, and that Eugenia was to him both mother and father, so that he seemed to feel himself more a Garsin than a Modigliani. And his maternal grandfather, besides helping his daughter’s family financially, took a great interest in her youngest son’s development. Much to the disgust and boredom of his two older brothers, who were more interested in ships and sailors, “Dedo” would have serious discussions with his grandfather about philosophy and art when the old man took him and his brothers for long walks along the quays. Young Amedeo remained with his mother long after his two brothers had left for college, Emmanuele to study the law, Umberto engineering.
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Modigliani’S attachment to his native Italy almost equaled his devotion to his mother. Leghorn, established too late to benefit from the glory of the Renaissance, while no great artistic center, was not an artistic desert either. It has a splendid baroque duomo, and numerous other churches. In the local museum, and in a privately owned gallery, the young Modigliani could admire works by Ghirlandaio, Signorelli, Titian, Caravaggio, Murillo, and Dürer—quite a variety for a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants. And two outstanding Italian painters of the 19th century, Giovanni Fattori and Vittorio Corco, had been born in Leghorn, and left their mark on the place.
The boy Amedeo received the rudiments of a classical education in the first four grades of the local high school—between 1894 and 1898—and he also read a lot. As an adolescent, he already knew large parts of Dante and Petrarch, Leopardi and Carducci by heart; he admired Baudelaire and Nietzsche, and had made himself well acquainted with several foreign languages.
In Paris, Modigliani learned to speak and write French perfectly, but he remained an Italian for all that. In the beginning he complained about his “damned Italian eyes” that could not get accustomed to the special light of Paris, and he was often homesick, it seems. In one such mood he wrote a nostalgic poem whose first six lines are in Italian, the rest in French. It begins: Grida e strida di rondini sul Mediterraneo—o Livorno¡ (“Cries and shrieks of swallows over the Mediterranean—O Leghorn!”) His last words, uttered on a hospital bed, were “Cara Italia!“
Just as he was proud of being an Italian, he was also proud of his Jewishness. Paul Guillaume, a French art dealer, recalled in 1931: “Modigliani made a point of being a Jew. On every possible occasion, and particularly when people did not immediately perceive it, he would announce that he was Jewish. He even claimed that his personality embodied the quintessential characteristics of the Jew. He adopted Jewish customs and ways that he had originally been ignorant of but which he noticed among the Jewish [i.e. East European] painters of Montparnasse. Whether he did this out of religious feeling, or simply from joy in the picturesque, I can’t tell. . . . He loved Rembrandt . . . and said that Rembrandt might possibly have been a Jew. . . . In his own sculptures he tried deliberately to manifest a brutal power which he called sens de Jehovah [the drift, or meaning, of Jehovah].”
Though he had received no Hebrew education, he was able, curiously enough, to write the dedication of a pencil sketch of Chana Orloff, the Jewish sculptress, in Hebrew. Once, when he overheard some Royalists in a Paris café making anti-Semitic remarks, he marched over to them, shouting “Je suis Juif!“ and silenced them with a threatening gesture. In 1913 Max Jacob, the poet-painter who had just left Judaism for Catholicism (he died years later in a German concentration camp), tried to induce him and the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz to do the same, but Modigliani replied, according to Lipchitz: “I don’t follow any religion myself, but if I did, I would keep to my Jewish religion, the one that my family has followed for so many centuries in Leghorn [sic]. Mine is a Jewish family that goes back almost to Roman times.” On the other hand, Augustus John tells in his autobiography of hearing Modigliani complain about being discriminated against because he was a Jew. “Alors, c’est malheureux d’être Juif?“ John asked. Modigliani said yes; Jacob Epstein, who was also present on this occasion, dissented strongly.
Whatever other beliefs he turned to (later in life he became a socialist and agnostic), his deepest faith remained art, which he had embraced already in his early adolescence. At the age of fourteen, in 1898, during a vacation from school when he fell sick with typhoid fever, he raved in his delirium about the paintings in the Palazzo Pitti and the Uffizi in Florence, where he had never been, and wept because he could not go to see them. This was the first clear sign of his future vocation. His mother, deeply worried, promised him that as soon as he recovered they would go to Florence together. She kept her promise. And also, she sent him shortly after to the best art teacher in Leghorn, a painter named Guglielmo Micheli. Amedeo worked with him from 1898 to 1900, and he was the first and last teacher of art he ever had.
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Micheli, who was born in 1866 and died in 1926, lived long enough to hear of his pupil’s posthumous fame, and he seems to have been a competent teacher, giving the boy a lot more in the way of technical training than the latter ever acknowledged later on. Though himself a mediocre artist, he was probably among the best masters Italy had to offer at a time when Italian art lacked creative personalities in general. He belonged to the most progressive Italian school of painting of the period, a group known as the “Macchiaioli” (from macchia—“dash of color”), whose members, like the French Impressionists, had discovered the open air, farm cottages, country roads, and the radiance of the sun on earth and water. But the freshness of their subject matter was not matched by a real freshness of technique, and the academy clung to them. Though Micheli painted seascapes vibrant with light, he never won more than a local success.
Modigliani’s apprenticeship was relatively short, and the details we know about it are few. In 1900 he was forced to break off his studies because he had fallen sick with tuberculosis. He was treated at the local clinic, but no effective cure for the disease had been developed as yet, and the infection was not completely eliminated. Nor did the sunshine of Southern Italy, where Signora Modigliani sent her son, effect a complete cure. Two decades later, when he was in his mid-thirties, dissipation, fatigue, and malnutrition brought on a fatal return of his illness. For the time being, however, it had been rendered inactive and he had the chance to see Capri, Amalfi, and other places. In Rome he attended the Easter services at St. Peter’s and heard the exquisite music; he visited the art galleries, and saw the old as well as the new Italian masters. In Naples, it is said, he was overwhelmed by certain works of Leonardo.
Returning from the South, Modigliani went to Venice, then to Florence, where, at his mother’s request, he took the examinations for the local academy of art. He passed, but does not seem to have done much studying at the academy, though he lived and worked in Florence all through 1902 and 1903. The better part of the next three years seems to have been passed in Venice. Periodically, however, he returned to his native Leghorn to spend some time with his family—more precisely, with his beloved mother. A photograph taken of him in 1904, when he was twenty, shows him as an unusually handsome, healthy young man, with thick dark hair, thoughtful eyes, and a soft mouth.
In Venice he associated with a Spanish artist, Ortiz de Zarate, who describes him as a dandy popular with the ladies. De Zarate says also that Modigliani still painted in an academic manner at that time. According to another artist who knew him then, Umberto Brunelleschi, he gave no signs of exceptional talent. But more significant is the fact that Modigliani confided to de Zarate that his burning desire was to become a sculptor, and de Zarate writes that it was only the high cost of the materials of sculpture that kept Modigliani from acting on his heart’s desire, so that he remained a painter only because he had no alternative as an artist.
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Neither de Zarate nor Brunelleschi knew Amedeo intimately, and their accounts, set down after a lapse of decades, should be received with caution. Unfortunately, none of the work Modigliani did before going to Paris seems to have survived—though careful search in the places where he lived in Italy might possibly yield some examples. Yet there exists written and unchallengeable evidence that even before Paris he had adopted a non-academic, anti-conventional outlook on life and art. It is this which makes us question the validity of Florent Fels’s assumption that had Modigliani stayed on in Italy he would never have become an important modernist. (“Had he remained in . . . his beloved Italy . . . he would have satisfied his romantic taste—that very taste which, in Paris, he violently expunged from his soul with great strength.”) We say, instead: it is possible that had Modigliani never left Italy he might have lived more soberly and longer. But there probably would have been the same rebellion. Paris produced neither his talent nor his neurosis. It did, however, enhance, more than another place might have, the morbid symptoms of both.
What encourages us in this opinion are five lengthy letters (hitherto unpublished in English) we possess that were written by the seventeen-year-old Modigliani in 1901 to his close friend Oscar Ghiglia (1879-1945). Ghiglia and Modigliani met first in Micheli’s studio; the two youths had many a long discussion as they walked the beaches of Leghorn. In 1902, the year after these letters were written, they shared a place in Florence, and the next year they had separate studios there. But after 1903 their ardent friendship seems to have ended, for reasons unknown to us.
Ghiglia, who was several years older than Modigliani, never achieved fame as an artist, but as a young man he must have responded to Amedeo’s enthusiasm. In these letters—all that survive of a long correspondence—the adolescent Modigliani emerges as an admirer of Nietzsche and Baudelaire, but making, alas, all too few references to painting. It is significant that he refers disdainfully to his old teacher, Micheli, because he now considers him highly unoriginal: “Micheli?” he writes from Capri: “Oh my God, how many of his kind there are in Capri. . . regiments!”
Nietzschean is Modigliani’s idea that life should be fully lived, without concern for obstacles, but with definite, purposeful intent, and sometimes even in pain, in order to “save one’s own dream.” And he urges his friend to cultivate sacredly all “that can exalt and excite your intelligence,” and to “seek to provoke . . . and create . . . these fertile stimuli, because they can push the intelligence to its maximum creative power.”
According to these letters, art for the young Modigliani was not a trade to be learned by diligent application, but rather a state of grace achieved by virtue of intellectual elevation. When this exalted state is attained, the state that follows “the awakening and dissolution of powerful energies,” the state in which “excitement” (orgasmo) is induced, then, and only then, does one know the joy of creation, which is at the same time a liberation. “ . . . I am rich and fertile now, and I need work,” Modigliani cries.
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Whatever de Zarate and Brunelleschi may have thought of Amedeo’s early work, this certainly is not the language of a conventional student. From Capri the young artist writes that he is waiting for the right moment “for organizing myself . . . and for working . . . in the good sense of the word, that is to say to dedicate myself with faith (body and soul) to organizing and developing all the impressions, all the germs of ideas, that I have harvested in this peace, as in a mystic garden.” On his visit to the Eternal City the seventeen-year-old enthusiast extols “the Rome that while I speak to you, is not outside, but inside me, like a terrible jewel fastened upon its seven hills, like seven imperious ideas. . . . Rome is the orchestration with which I encircle myself, the circumscribed area within which I isolate myself and in which I concentrate my thought. Its feverish sweetness, its tragic countryside, its beautiful and harmonious forms, all these things are mine through my thought and through my work. . . . I seek further to formulate with the greatest possible lucidity the truths about art and life that I have gleaned meagerly from among the beauties of Rome. . . .”
In another letter Amedeo talks to Oscar about his emotional troubles and difficulties: “They are all necessary stages of evolution through which we have to pass and which have no importance other than the end to which they lead. Believe me, the work that has arrived by now at its final stage of gestation, and which has become depersonalized by the obstacle of all particular incidents which have contributed to its fertilization and production, is not worth the trouble of being expressed and translated in style. The efficacy and necessity of style consists exactly in this: that beyond being the only vocabulary capable of bringing out an idea, it detaches it [the idea] from the individual who has produced it [and] leaves the way open to that which cannot or should not be said. . . .”
In the last of these letters—what a pity that so very little of Modigliani’s correspondence has been preserved!—the youth again refers to his own and his bosom friend’s growing pains: “Affirm and surmount yourself always. The man who does not know how to release new desires continually from his energy, to release an almost new individual destined always to express himself by laying low all that is old and rotten, is not a man, he is a bourgeois, a real knave, or what you will. . . .”
It is possible, even likely, that a few years later the artist would have smiled at these manifestations of juvenile exuberance. But I doubt whether he would have repudiated them, for his idealism remained with him throughout his short and agitated life. To the very end he would have subscribed to what he said when only seventeen: “Beauty . . . has some painful duties: these duties create, nevertheless, the most beautiful expressions of the soul.”
In any event, it was inevitable that the youth who wrote these letters would soon find a place like Leghorn too narrow and confining. He had heard a lot in Venice about Montmartre and its artists’ colony from his friend Ortiz, and by 1906 he was ready to go there. Financed by his family and accompanied by his mother’s good wishes, he took the train for France.
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Once he had arrived in Paris, it turned out that a mere geographical move was not enough—an inner break with his past was necessary. It is ironical, and a little funny, to see how the young man who had been so bold and unconventional in his letters was now shocked and even repelled by the atmosphere of the French capital. It was precisely in Montmartre that he felt the most uncomfortable, discovering that he was, after all, still more of a bourgeois than a free-living bohemian.
It did not help much that he changed his style of dress to brown corduroys, scarlet scarf, and a big black hat; he still looked like a bourgeois at a masquerade. Nor did he become any the more a bohemian by renting a studio in the center of the Latin Quarter, on the Rue Caulaincourt, and furnishing it with a piano, plush drapes, a plaster cast of Beethoven’s head, and reproductions of Italian Renaissance paintings. For more than a little while he remained the dutiful, sober student away from home, writing regularly to his mother, and weeping with homesickness when he read her letters. He punctually attended the famous Colarossi school on the Rue Chaumière and diligently sketched from the nude, but always hid the results with his hand. He drank Italian wine—and nothing else—in moderation, had no vices, and kept his bachelor apartment neat. Being unsure of himself this timid, almost reserved Italian would not discuss art with strangers, and he was astonishingly conservative in his views. Once, when Picasso passed him in a cafe, Modigliani made a derogatory remark about his wearing dirty workmen’s clothes; Picasso might have talent, he said, but that did not excuse his uncouth appearance.
The break with the past came, however, before he had spent a full year in Paris.
One day a friend came and found Modigliani’s atelier completely changed. It was in chaos; the Renaissance reproductions had been stuffed away into a box; and as for the studio’s occupant himself—he was now an alcoholic and a drug addict. But far more important, he had also suddenly become a revolutionary in the realm of art. We do not know precisely what caused this sudden transformation from bourgeois into a “peintre maudit,“ nor are we sure of the exact moment—if there was one—at which it took place. But we do know that Andre Salmon, the critic and poet, subsequently insisted that Modigliani’s talent was directly due to his vices: “From the day he abandoned himself to certain forms of debauchery an unexpected light came upon him, transforming his art. From that day on he became one who must be counted among the masters of living art.” Another biographer, Charles Douglas, quoting Andre Utter—the husband of Suzanne Valadon and stepfather of Utrillo—as his informant, claims, however, 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.”
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There is, of course, no medical reason for suggesting that either alcohol or hashish made Modigliani “invent” the characteristic features of his mature style. Alcohol and drugs merely helped to release the timid young man, who lacked love, friendship, and guidance, from his inhibitions so that he could proceed faster toward that freedom of which he had dreamed in his juvenile letters. Just 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. Alcohol, hashish, and sexual promiscuity were a means of liberating himself from Leghorn and all it stood for. And he knew that his family, his beloved mother included, would reject his new way of painting as crazy.
The Jews of Leghorn lived sober lives, drank only wine, married early, and raised families. But this renegade chose for a friend the painter Utrillo, an alcoholic who would not have been admitted to the Modigliani apartment at home. Modigliani also had countless affairs with women of all sorts, most of them quite unlike his mother—models, waitresses, prostitutes. His whole life was a succession of protests: against the bourgeois smugness of his family of impoverished bankers, against his old art teacher Micheli, and against a society that refused to recognize and reward his talent.
Picasso once remarked on his exhibitionism: “You can find Utrillo drunk anywhere . . . but Modigliani is always drunk right in front of the Rotonde or the Dôme”—that is, where he could be seen by writers, critics, and fellow artists. Often he carried this exhibitionism to extremes: when he got drunk enough he would strip naked at social gatherings. And this exhibitionism led him always, when he painted or drew from life, to put something of his own appearance as it were, into that of his sitters. What his contemporaries may have taken for exaggerated vanity was, however, more uncontrolled exuberance than anything else. As he replied—according to the writer Michel Georges-Michel—when a doctor reproached him for too much drinking:
“I need a flame in order to paint, in order to be consumed by fire. My concierge and the butcher boy have no need of alcohol, especially if it does them harm. They must conserve their precious lives. . . . But as for me, my life, it is important only because of what I put on my canvas. . . . 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.”
But with this statement, we have long lost all trace of “Dedo,” the idealistic, spoiled youth from Leghorn, and entered a chapter that might be called “Modigliani the Damned.”
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The rest of the story is so well known that it need not be repeated here in detail. Modigliani had a dozen reckless years of life left, and except for a few months in Leghorn, where his family tried in vain to reform him, he spent them all in Paris ruining himself systematically—and yet working too. He smoked incessantly. Under the influence of alcohol and drugs he made long, shocking speeches before the astonished patrons of bistros; once, when arrested, after a riotous scene, he startled the police with an impassioned and dramatic recital of poetry.
He had a universal fascination for women. He could give them little, not even his undivided attention, but this did not keep them from throwing themselves at his feet, and they were only too eager to supply him with everything that he needed: brushes, colors, canvases, alcohol, and drugs. One married woman, despairing because she could not possess Modigliani exclusively, became a drug addict herself and eventually died in a sanatorium. Fickle as he was, he never married, but towards the end of his life he found a French girl sufficiently self-effacing to be able to live with him. When a daughter was born to Jeanne Hébuterne, “Modi” made an effort to register her birth, but on the way to the municipal office he stopped at a bar and forgot all about it. Time and again the beautiful Jeanne would follow him to his favorite cafe, and cajole him to come back home with her before he became too drunk to walk. When Modigliani died, and she saw his dead body on a hospital bed, she proceeded a few hours later to commit suicide.
Countless were the people Modigliani captivated by the wit and charm he could display, even when totally drunk. One of them was a Polish-born poet and art dealer, Leopold Zborowski. At a time when nearly everybody else thought Modigliani crazy and without talent, Zborowski was already firmly convinced of his genius, and he pestered every art patron he knew to come and see his friend’s work. But very few canvases were sold, and even those at ridiculously low prices; Modigliani remained abysmally poor to the end of his days.
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Zborowski survived his protégé by twelve years—he died in 1932—and lived to see Modigliani’s fame rise to the skies. In 1922, only two years after the artist’s death, the museum in Grénoble bought one of his pictures, the first in a long succession to be acquired by museums; in the same year a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Galérie Bernheim Jeune in Paris. Eight years later the celebrated Venice Biennale included about fifty of Modigliani’s works in an effort to make amends to an artist who during his lifetime had been so sorely neglected.
An indefatigable worker even when drunk, Modigliani was a pioneer in sculpture even more than in painting, but only about twenty of the stones he carved have been preserved. They show him as influenced by Brancusi, and an admirer of the anonymous Negro folk carvers of Africa whose directness of approach, simplicity, and economy of means he emulated. As a painter, on the other hand, he left behind five hundred oils in addition to countless works in other media. Here the main influence was, in addition to African sculpture (whose effects were perhaps even more visible in his painting than in his sculpture), the great “primitives” of Tuscany who preceded the Renaissance masters. From them he learned how to take liberties with line, distorting it to step up dramatic intensity of expression and bring out the inner stresses of his emotion.
There are certain features by which even a layman can recognize Modigliani’s elegant portraits of Montmartre and Montparnasse characters, as well as his lush yet somehow virginal nudes. But it is not for its mannerisms that his art has become immortal, nor is it these that lead people to pay anywhere from five to ten thousand dollars for one of his canvases. The important thing is that Modigliani created formal and universal beauty in perpetuating the essentials of a face or body.
His work, first shown in this country on a large scale in 1929, was celebrated in a huge retrospective exhibit held in Cleveland and then New York in 1951. What he stands for in the story of modern art has been summed up most succinctly by 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. Life of an artist, life of exaltations! I shall not recount the picturesque bohemianisms of it or the paradoxical and constant defiance of rule; or the absence of all traces of domesticity. But for all that, for all the defects and qualities, the taste for unhappiness and the exceptional, the torrent of graces, the deliriousness and the naughtiness, Modigliani leaves a void behind him that cannot soon be filled.”
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