The Uncannily Strange and Brief Life of Amedeo Modigliani

by Velibor Colic

  Some kind of comedy, the painter asked the man beside him.

  No idea.

  Maybe something free at last, replied a tramp.

  Amedeo Modigliani went on standing there for a while longer, coughing, the wind piercing his temples, and then finally turned away and let his feet carry him of their own accord to Montparnasse.

  Apples, Wine

  THIS INCIDENT also occurred in Paris, in 1919, and according to Amedeo’s daughter Giovanna Modigliani, who heard about it first-hand and recorded it in her book, Modigliani—Man and Myth, it happened like this:

  At some stage in the autumn of the said year, the French-Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, following his old—he would say also good—custom, called in the early hours of one morning into the Rotonde café for a morning coffee and a drink.

  “YES?” said the bad-tempered barman to the new arrival who had just sat down at the bar. “APPLES AND WINE,” replied Modigliani.

  “BUT, SIR,” said the barman surprised, “WE DON’T SERVE APPLES!”

  “WHAT CAN WE DO,” Modigliani is supposed to have responded sadly, “IF THERE’S NO RAIN, ICE IS GOOD. SO GIVE ME JUST WINE …”

  Jeanne, Motherhood I

  THE LIGHT, coming in misty cascades from the street transforms her naked, sleepy body, languid with sleep, into an arabesque. Her face is a dappled African mask.

  Jeanne breathes evenly.

  Inhalation.

  Exhalation.

  Her hair, heavy, red as a flame, is strewn over the pillows.

  Touched by the sight of his sleeping wife, Jeanne Hébuterne, Amedeo Modigliani approaches, quietly as though he was truly a shadow, and places his ear on her belly, just slightly taut with motherhood.

  Warm, infinite.

  Amedeo Modigliani hears inside, within her, a third heart beating.

  Dream, Kandinsky

  WHILE HE NIBBLED the leaves of a vine, like a tame rabbit that returns to the garden before each winter.

  While he breathed in the scent of her sticky hair through the darkness.

  While he dreamed that he was awake, but still dreaming.

  While he hushed the wind in her nostrils.

  While he said the rosary of her name,

  mechanically, persistently and slowly.

  Jeanne was a boy.

  Jeanne was a shepherd.

  While he pressed sleep into her eyebrows and eyelashes with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

  While he made castanets of her knees.

  While he kissed with the fig of his lips the silver chain round her neck with a medallion of Our Lady of Livorno.

  While he touched with the feathers of a nameless bird the spring nest of her—and his—motherhood.

  While it seemed to him in his delusion that he had been born anew.

  While he cleaned the dust of angels out from under her nails and from her fingers.

  While he said the rosary of her name,

  mechanically, persistently and slowly.

  The Blue Rider

  came to them

  and said:

  UNATTAINABLE.

  Renoir, Star

  IN THE GRIP of the December night of the third day of December, 1919—the day that the weary painter Renoir died—Amedeo Modigliani, the ‘little Jew from Livorno’, as his contemporaries called him, alone in his studio, is drawing with a black pencil, in broad, expansive strokes the long, pale face of a tender old woman, Eugénie Garsin-Modigliani, his mother. On the table, beside the portfolio of sketches, stands a bottle of wine, just begun.

  Outside, it is freezing.

  The Rue de la Grande Chaumière puts on a winter shirt out of ancient tales and fairy-stories.

  The painter coughs.

  He can feel his beard, the last of his life, growing suddenly as though it were spring grass.

  Modigliani lays down his pencil, and completely inaudibly, as though he is no longer an inhabitant of this world, as though he has already passed over into the world of memories and shadows, he approaches his bed and, with a deep sigh, fully dressed, he lies down.

  At the moment when his breathing becomes a steady, tranquil sibilance, a single star, the brightest, breaks out of the sky above Paris and falls.

  Renoir.

  Modigliani lived in a heroic age. He suffered its counterblows. From the outset, all his canvases bear the mark of the profound disquiet that troubled the best of his contemporaries.

  Modigliani was too great an artist to remain outside the ardent throng. But his specific style was never altered by a fashion that was strange.

  WALDEMAR GEORGES

  Paris, Dada

  IN THE COURSE of his uncannily strange and brief life, Amedeo Modigliani, painter, bohemian and vagabond, had three encounters with Monsieur Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier.

  A first time, just one time, and the last time.

  They met by chance, in the street. Amedeo Modigliani was roaming the streets, clutching a terrifying emptiness in his pockets, while the wind of oblivion wound through his uncombed hair and beard, a wind that confuses human thoughts, interweaves sleep and desires, merges two worlds, that of the everyday and the one that is rarely, almost never, reached by human perception or experience.

  The Second Kingdom of Death.

  When he first caught sight of the figure of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, also known as Le Corbusier, dressed in a white suit and a red hat, on which a bird, a dodo, was sleeping, Modigliani felt that he had seen the Angel of Dadaism.

  Everything confirmed it.

  Le Corbusier’s cane made of ivory, his moustache pointed upwards like the hands of a clock indicating ten minutes past ten ( / ), but, above all, his curious, somehow square smile whose shape contained something of the reduction, simplicity, perfection of a cube or a dice.

  Hello bird, said Le Corbusier.

  Amedeo Modigliani smiled and touched the rim of his shabby hat with his forefinger.

  Farewell earth, farewell water.

  Farewell dead dodo bird, Modigliani joked.

  Le Corbusier, whose glance was so swift that he was able to see his own back, took four dice out of the left-hand inside pocket of his jacket, offered them to Modigliani, turned and disappeared into the crowd. Instead of numbers, there were four letters engraved on them.

  D—A—D—A, read Modigliani.

  Then he coughed huskily, painfully, and continued his vain, aimless walk without end.

  Life is a dream which cannot be understood while it is being dreamed, thought the painter as the day, in any case already dead, was transformed into yet another weighty, cold night of fasting.

  Circus, Silence

  THE FOLLOWING DAY he got drunk with Soutine. They drank wine at the Rotonde, like thirsty soldiers, alone, each absorbed in his own silence, until their eyes became poppy flowers, and their nose and ears as loud as a waterfall.

  Today is Friday, said Soutine as they emerged into the meagre light of Montparnasse, holding onto the left-hand sleeve of his great friend’s jacket.

  There was no reply.

  Silence from the other side.

  An inexplicable, empty, vast silence had settled in Amedeo Modigliani.

  Their red faces, just a little sprinkled with perspiration, seemed to have slipped off a poster for the circus that often came in the festive colourful days leading up to Christmas, to the little place in the south where the painter spent his childhood.

  They walked.

  Together, but nevertheless each for himself, separately.

  And each of them, Modigliani and Soutine, trying to shout louder than his own silence.

  Once he’d gone, I felt calm again. But all this excitement had exhausted me and I dropped heavily on to my sleeping-plank. I must have had a longish sleep, for, when I woke, the stars were shining down on my face. Sounds of the countryside came faintly in, and the cool night air, veined with smells of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks. The marvellous peace of the sleepbound sum
mer night flooded through me like a tide. Then, just on the edge of daybreak, I heard a steamer’s siren. People were starting on a voyage to a world which had ceased to concern me, for ever. Almost for the first time in many months I thought of my mother. And now, it seemed to me, I understood why at her life’s end she had taken on a ‘fiancé’; why she’d played at making a fresh start. There, too, in that Home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace. With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained was to hope that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

  ALBERT CAMUS, The Outsider

  Montparnasse, Night

  “INTO A NEW YEAR. Into a new life!” That is what was written on the postcard that the painter Amedeo Modigliani received from his old childhood friend Oscar M to greet the New Year 1920.

  Festive fever.

  The whole city was waiting for the little God to be born again in the straw. The streets were already echoing with firecrackers, the laughter of the sated, drunk and contented, the future had already arrived—in the twentieth year of the twentieth century, it seemed that a new golden age was beginning for the whole of humanity.

  In the Rue de la Grande Chaumière, in the Modiglianis’ modest flat, the adults were swallowing the holy smoke that comes from strange oriental pipes while the child, Giovanna, her eyes the colour of extinguished ash, was looking out of the window, down the street, suppressing the little frozen dove of her anxiety, simply staring as she waited for the white reindeers and sled of Saint Nicholas the Gift-Giver.

  The world is full of scoundrels, the world has always been full of scoundrels, whispered Amedeo Modigliani, as though he were saying a prayer, while the beard on his face changed colour and turned to silver.

  The world is full of scoundrels. Jeanne Hébuterne, whose hair reminded him increasingly of the colour of the poppies in Livorno, sprinkled her sorrow through the room like water, it seemed that, with the help of an inner eye, this noble woman could already see two new graves, one beside the other, under the fresh snow, weather when no one leaves the house, in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

  The wise thing is to pluck out one’s heart in good time, he says.

  Before sorrow settles in it.

  She gets up from the worm-eaten chair, goes up to the man and places her left hand on the seemingly still boyish crown of his head.

  Amedeo Modigliani turns his head and sinks his face into warm silk.

  The child has fallen asleep on the floor.

  The story of Saint Nicholas and the gifts—the first great lie in the life of Giovanna Modigliani.

  Although she waited a long, long, long time with big wishes concealed in her small heart—he did not appear.

  The Rue de la Grande Chaumière remained empty.

  The world is full of scoundrels.

  Jeanne, Motherhood II

  JEANNE IS STILL the bud of a winter rose, frozen and iron-bound, her advanced pregnancy makes her face even more beautiful, nobler, but ailing Amedeo Modigliani can already see quite clearly through his eyes, red-hot with fever, that some kind of immeasurable and incalculable sorrow is blossoming in her. The strange docility and gentleness of this fettered doe, soft with the new life swelling inside her, makes the sick man still more unhappy, bewildered, erratic.

  The weather appears to be changing, says Jeanne as they lie together in the dark, their limbs intertwined, the sky will soon be entering the constellation of Cancer.

  Of course, says Modigliani.

  Bad times are coming because the world is full of scoundrels.

  Sleep eludes him and the man gets up, goes over to the easel and gazes for a long time at the untouched and empty white canvas.

  He sighs, goes to the window and throws it wide open.

  Outside something smells wet and terrible, it smells of poverty and rain-soaked dogs, of a journey with no home-coming, of requiems and dirges, it smells of the chill from beyond the grave, and the painter Amedeo Modigliani knows that it is snow.

  Montparnasse, Snow

  FINALLY, ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH of December 1920 AD, on Christmas Day, it snowed.

  A heavy wet shawl covered the earth.

  Amedeo Modigliani is holding in his hand a summons to a court hearing in connection with the death of the sow-woman Carmelita. Her sister, Donna Clara, has already crossed the frontier.

  Alone in the street.

  He breathes with difficulty.

  The painter Amedeo Modigliani is weary.

  There is no point in movement, he thinks, he spreads his arms and turns his face towards the sky, which sends down its ghastly feathers.

  It’s a bird, it seems to him, but his breath is getting shorter, stopping altogether, the man staggers, he is near the end, and finally, entirely resigned, Amedeo Modigliani buries his face in the frozen silk.

  Happy Christmas, sorrowful bird, says his friend Chaim Soutine some icy minutes later, lifting him from the white, festive and ghostly pavement of Montparnasse.

  From somewhere, in the distance, church bells with their galvanised clattering, invite the faithful to mass.

  Leopold, Béatrice

  IN PARIS, at the beginning of January 1920, Leopold Zborowski, an antiquarian from Poland, offered Baronness Béatrice six nudes by Amedeo Modigliani in small quarto format.

  The Baronness bought them and when they were delivered to her she exchanged a few words with him.

  The Pole used some of the money to buy wine and fish.

  He drank the rest.

  In March, the second day of spring in that same year, the Baronness learned from a passenger on the Hypnos that in the night between the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of January, in the paupers’ Hôpital de la Charité, Amedeo Modigliani had given up his consumption-tormented soul.

  He was buried soon afterwards.

  HE HAD A BIG HEART WROTE Baronness Béatrice in her diary, hiccuping tipsily, that same evening, squinting over the scant, niggardly, flickering yellow light of her candle.

  In the morning she gave her still youthful body to the captain.

  Absurd is the man who, out of a fundamental absurdity, draws, without hesitation, conclusions that impose themselves. There is the same displacement of sense as when young people dancing ‘swing’ are called swing. So what is the absurd as primary state, as original given? Nothing less than the relation of man to the world. Primal absurdity manifests above all a divorce: the divorce between the aspirations of man towards unity and the insurmountable dualism of the spirit and of nature, between the striving of man for the eternal and the finite character of his existence, between the ‘concern’ that is his very essence and the vanity of his efforts. Death, the irreducible pluralism of truths and beings, the unintelligibility of the real, chance, those are the poles of the absurd.

  JEAN-PAUL SARTRE,

  Analysis of The Outsider

  Giovanna, Emigrés

  AS FAR AS I know, Giovanna Modigliani told three bearded Poles in Florence in 1958, my father’s troubles began on Twelfth Night 1920 when, in the Rotonde café, he sold the Archangel Gabriel the last fragment of his lungs that were in any case ruined.

  With some of the money my father bought wine and fish.

  He drank the rest.

  He came home blind drunk and coughed up blood for days.

  By the end of the month he was dead.

  And that was about it.
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  Giovanna Modigliani then drank the rest of her coffee and went out into the sweltering crowd in the street. What a holy misfortune, said the first Pole, who reeked of vodka, to bear the name of Modigliani all one’s life.

  Of course, said the others.

  They clinked their glasses and drank.

  Amedeo, Angel I

  LOLOTTE, THE ACACIA of the Paris underworld, bright as a ray of sunshine, stepping gaily as though she were dancing a polka, like a music-hall queen, the heels of her shoes barely touching the pavement in front of the Rotonde, approaches a tall thin man and kisses him on the top of his head.

  Who are you waiting for, sailor, she says.

  Mmmm, it smells of roses here, the painter barely murmurs.

  Lolotte looks him in the eye and notices that he is blind drunk.

  I feel, she says later in a hotel room, lying on her side like a Venus, I feel you with my face, hands, breasts and I see, I see the proximity, the dangerous proximity of the yellow colour of DEATH. On the sky beneath the arc of the moon, on your face, under the vault of your eyebrows, in the street, under the streetlights, and everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.

  In your paintings, Modigliani.

  Everywhere, everywhere is the yellow furrow of death.

  I am afraid for you, sailor.

  The man says nothing and turns onto his other side with a sigh.

  He stares dully into the darkness.

  Lolotte straightens up, lights a cigarette and lets her tears fall down her face.

  The spring comes quietly, says the painter, wiping away her tears, spring awakens all things, touches my hair, my hand, it enters my dreams.