Meryle Secrest

by Modigliani: A Life

  Modigliani’s exact movements in these years are not entirely clear. But it seems likely that before this latest illness he also studied with Fattori. He took an examination for the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and was given permission to copy paintings in its galleries. Eugénie’s memoir, published by Noël Alexandre in The Unknown Modigliani, records that he never attended regular classes and, as before, continued to be largely self-taught. Early letters to the family of this period have been lost. However, they were aware that he spent a great deal of time looking at art books in the Biblioteca Nazionale. Margherita records an incident that took place there, presenting it as proof of her brother’s autocratic and mulish character. She writes that, as he was there one day studying, a librarian accused him of having stolen a valuable book. Modigliani replied with “a volley of insults.” The director was called and was also given a piece of his mind by the eighteen-year-old upstart. The library took legal action and the case went to court. Modigliani’s lawyer was able to prove, not only that his client was innocent, but that the real culprit, the man who stole the book, was the librarian who had accused Modigliani. Margherita was not pleased. She wrote that her brother, who had “abused” a civil servant, would not apologize. Why she should expect Dedo to apologize when he had been wrongly accused, tells us more about her than him.

  Modigliani moved to Venice in the spring of 1903 and enrolled in the Scuola Libera del Nudo at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in May. All his life Modigliani made friends easily, and he was making contact with a distinguished group: Umberto Boccioni, the Futurist painter and sculptor, Fabrio Mauroner, with whom he shared a studio in the San Barnaba quarter and whose interests would include sculpture, painting, the graphic arts, and art criticism; as well as artists Mario Crepet, Cesare Mainella, Guido Marussi, Ardengo Soffici, and Guido Cadorin. Such encounters with the cream of intellectual and artistic life in Venice suggest assiduous cultivation. Perhaps it was in Venice that Modigliani learned the pivotal rule for the up-and-coming young artist, the right cafés at the right moment. In Venice it was the Florian, which never closed. Meanwhile he occasionally went to life classes, relying on his eye and the lessons to be had by daily visits to the great museums, studying the Bellinis and Carpaccios with concentration.

  He had also met a young Chilean painter, Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, whose Italian was fluent and who liked to boast about his Basque origins. Sichel described him as “a hulking, muscular youth who, with his big head, deep brooding eyes and powerful features, looked older than his age.” Even though he was only seventeen, Ortiz had already been to Paris and fired Modigliani with enthusiasm for this world center of all that mattered in art and sculpture. Like most of Modigliani’s friends Ortiz was barely surviving and intensely envious to find Modigliani living in comfort and wearing a perfectly magnificent pair of pajamas. Modigliani was painting, but Ortiz was not impressed by the results; his work seemed lackluster. In any event, painting was not on Modigliani’s mind just then. Ortiz recalled, he “expressed a burning desire to become a sculptor and was bemoaning the cost of material. He was painting only faute de mieux. His real ambition was to work in stone.”

  Jeanne Modigliani, who writes with a delicate understanding of her father’s work, thought he must have conceived the ambition to become a sculptor in Naples, visiting the churches of Santa Chiara, San Lorenzo, San Domenico, and Santa Maria Donna Regina, and discovering the work of Tino di Camaino, the thirteenth-century Sienese sculptor who was head of the works at Siena Cathedral and later worked in Florence. The discovery of Tino’s work demonstrated the successful solution of “those plastic problems with which he would be dealing all through his short artistic career,” she wrote. There was the “oblique placing of the heads on cylindrical necks, the synthesis of decorative mannerism with a sculptural density and above all, the use of line not only as a graphic after-thought but as a means of composing his volumes and holding his masses together in a way that even seems to accentuate their heaviness. From that time on, critics of Modigliani’s work see it as a continual oscillation, which at its best results in a synthesis between the demands of his clean rhythmic line and his love for full, solid and rounded volume.”

  Modigliani’s first attempt at sculpture was, however, unpromising. Accounts vary but he would seem to have traveled to the great marble quarries in Carrara, some thirty-five miles north of Livorno, in 1902 or 1903, setting himself in the studio of Emilio Puliti in Petrasanta, a little village five miles away. The fact that he actually accomplished a sculpture is demonstrated by a letter he wrote to Gino Romiti that enclosed photographs of the result, asking Romiti to make some enlargements. When marble proved to be too formidable, Modigliani turned to stone and came up with two or three studies. It was difficult, exhausting work, and so for the time being he abandoned the effort and went back to painting. His sculptures were, of course, all heads.

  Eugénie wrote in her diary, “I can’t see yet who he will become, but as before his health is the only thing I think about and in spite of the economic situation I can’t yet give much importance to his future career.” Meantime, her son continued to make friends. “I visited Venice for the first time in 1903,” Ardengo Soffici wrote, and a colleague introduced him to Modigliani. “At the time he was a handsome, kindly-looking young man, of average height, slim and dressed with a sober elegance. He was serenely charming to everyone and spoke very intelligently and calmly.

  “During my stay in Venice we spent many pleasant hours together, either strolling round the wonderful city to which he acted as my guide, or in a cheap restaurant he took us to.” Modigliani ate sparingly and drank little or no wine. “There, eating fried fish the strong tang of which I can still smell, my new friend entertained us with talk of his researches into the painting technique of the Italian primitives, his passionate study of fourteenth-century Sienese art, and, especially, the Venetian Carpaccio, of whom he seemed particularly fond.”

  Fabio Mauroner recalled that while in Venice Modigliani was painting a large portrait of a lawyer in the style of Eugène Carrière and making studies of the nude models usually to be found in his studio.

  “He would spend the evenings, and stay late into the night, in the remotest brothels where, he said, he learned more than in any academy … After a while I had occasion to show him some volumes of Vittorio Pica’s Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle, the first and perhaps the only interesting Italian study of modern engravers and graphic artists.” Mauroner was trying to interest Modigliani in the graphic arts, but without success. “Already during those days,” Mauroner wrote, “Amedeo was looking for the line, which he saw as having a spiritual value in its simplification, as a solution to his search for the essential meaning of life. But while he was in Venice this ambition was hardly more than a vague abstract idea in his mind. The experience of this, and its practice, was still a distant dream.”

  One never quite knew, with Modigliani, when a discussion of the practical problems of technique and composition would take a sudden turn and start examining the riddles of existence. One of his letters to Oscar Ghiglia ends with the comment that, when the time came for him to leave Venice, the city would have imparted some unforgettable lessons. What those were, he did not exactly say. “Venice, head of Medusa, with its many blue snakes with their pale, sea-green eyes, where the soul is engulfed and exalts the infini …” Such heady shifts of ground appealed to some friends and exasperated others. Llewelyn Lloyd, his old friend from their student days in Livorno, ran into him one morning in 1905 on the Piazza San Marco. “He immediately began to talk about pictorial and technical problems, going from art to philosophy and other abstruse matters. The day was beautiful, the square enchanting, pigeons flew in great circles over our heads, the Venetian scarves fluttered in the breeze from the Lagoon. I couldn’t take any more, and just left.”

  That was the year Dedo became convinced his future lay in Paris, and early that year Uncle Amédée, who had done so much for him, died. Eugénie’s dia
ry entry for February 1905 does not give the cause of death. She wrote that she had just returned from Marseille, where she had been dealing with the papers of her “poor dear Amédée.” She could not bring herself to recapitulate the whole, sad history. “Nothing will fill the void he has left in my life. There was an affection that was too complicated, too often tested, made of pity and trust, and above all from such a complete communion of souls that nothing will replace it.” But she had to keep reminding herself that “he could never be happy and that everything was for the best.” This revelation that the man everyone loved, who was perpetually in a good mood, was actually incapable of happiness, is surprising, to say the least. If, as rumor has it, Amédée committed suicide, Eugenie’s final thoughts support that possibility.

  Just how Modigliani survived financially is another imponderable. Parisot writes that Amédée Garsin, then believed to be bankrupt, nevertheless left his nephew a small inheritance, on which he drew for the next three years, supplemented by a small allowance from his mother. It is certainly true that Modigliani arrived in Paris in style, as witnessed by numbers of his friends, who thought he had been left a fortune by a rich uncle. True, he was painting portraits—the subject of the large portrait Mauroner saw in his studio was probably a lawyer named Franco Montini—but how many were actually paid for is also a moot point. Other works, such as a portrait of Mauroner himself, have been lost. Modigliani knew a prominent Venetian family, the Olpers, through his sister—Albertina Olper had been Margherita’s school friend—and is known to have visited them often. His sister also believed Dedo had painted a portrait of Leone Olper, Albertina’s father. When the family wanted to sell the painting in 1933, Giovanni Scheiwiller, an early biographer of Modigliani’s, was asked for help in finding a buyer. However, Ambrogio Ceroni did not include this painting in his accounting of Modigliani’s works, and it has not been listed by other scholars. Modigliani was famously unsatisfied by his own work and it is possible that, when the time came to leave Venice, and to avoid the expense of taking the canvases with him, many of them were destroyed.

  Modigliani took very little with him to Paris in 1906; clothes, perhaps a few books, and picture reproductions. Fabio Mauroner bought his easels and “a few studio oddments.” Before Modigliani left he told Mauroner that his mother had visited him. Curiously, she came to him, rather than the reverse. Was this a last-ditch effort to get him to come home with her? We shall never know. She did, in any event, give him some money for the trip. She also presented him with a handsome edition of a poem by Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” which had been published seven years before, in 1898, and became a best seller in France and England.

  Since this was a family that set a very high value on poetry, a work by the English dramatist, novelist, and poet, who was tried and convicted in 1895 for his homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, and spent time in prison, was certainly not a chance gift but meant to send a message. That much seems likely, even if the message is not so easy to discern.

  The poem is an ostensible account of the case of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards who, believing his twenty-three-year-old wife to be unfaithful, slit her throat. He was hanged at Reading Gaol the year Wilde himself faced trial in London. But, as Richard Ellmann points out in his biography, the year 1895 had another significance for Wilde. That year he had rejected Douglas’s article celebrating their love, and a few months later refused to accept Douglas’s dedication of his poems. Ellmann wrote, “The gesture grew out of the feeling that Douglas had destroyed his life … Wooldridge as a real image, and Douglas and himself in parable, all conformed to an unwritten law.” That law, often quoted, was: “For each man kills the thing he loves.”

  By another coincidence that presentation of a handsome volume of Wilde’s final work was five years, almost to the month, since the poet had died in Paris. (In November 1900.) It was the same year that Eugénie’s adored brother Amédée had left the world, for whatever reason, the man who never could be happy. Who then had killed whom?

  Whatever the unconscious message, this parting gift of a poem by a doomed poet who had, as Ellmann also wrote, “the sense of a strange fatality hanging over him,” was hardly an appropriate message for a son about to set off into life. Was someone “snatching away” yet another of Eugénie’s dear ones, and was she responding in the same way again? Did she think that Amedeo was destroying her life as, by loving him, Wilde felt Douglas had destroyed his? In her diary of 1896, Eugénie wrote, “I am a reflection of other people’s lives.” Did she, at some unaware level, expect his life to become a reflection of hers?

  According to Jeanne Modigliani, whose determination to correct a number of false assertions makes her more reliable than most about dates, Modigliani arrived in Paris in January 1906. Springtime in Paris was, after all, the moment of moments. In March 1848 George Sand wrote, “What a dream Paris is, what enthusiasm there is there, and yet what decorum and order! I’ve just come from the city: I flew there and saw the people in their grandeur, sublime, naive and generous … I went many nights without sleep, many days without sitting down. People are mad, they’re intoxicated, they’re happy to sleep in the gutters & congregate in the heavens.” Modigliani was not sleeping in gutters, at least not yet, but comfortably installed in a hotel near the Madeleine. Perhaps he was ready to start work but feeling, as John Dos Passos did a decade later, that the day was “too gorgeously hot and green and white and vigorous.” He continued, “How do people manage to live through the spring? I have never felt it more insanely.”

  Modigliani, soon after his arrival in Paris, c. 1906 (image credit 5.2)

  Or perhaps, like the American art student Abel Warshawsky two years later (1908), Modigliani arrived one rainy night in the cheerless darkness, loaded his luggage onto one of the newfangled horseless carriages, and was driven along the rain-washed pavements, smelling gasoline mingled with roasting chestnuts, turning and turning into narrower and narrower streets while the driver honked his horn. Warshawsky was arriving in the autumn and perhaps Modigliani did as well. We have no diaries or letters to confirm the month, but Gino Severini, the Futurist painter, states that he arrived in Paris in October 1906, and Modigliani had arrived just three weeks before him. Paris in the autumn has charms of its own, as Dos Passos was to describe, after spending “an atrociously delightful month of wandering through autumn gardens and down grey misty colonaded streets, of poring over bookshops and dining at little tables in back streets, of going to concerts, and riding in squeaky voitures with skeleton horses, of wandering constantly through dimly-seen crowds and peeping in on orgies of drink and women, of vague incomplete adventures—All in a constant sensual drowse at the mellow beauty of the colors & forms of Paris, of old houses overhanging the Seine and damp streets smelling of the dead and old half-forgotten histories.”

  The Paris Modigliani found during the Third Republic was a city in dynamic flux, one of boundless opportunity. The ruthless hand of the architect Georges Haussmann had wiped out whole sections of the old city in order to introduce the grands boulevards with their squares and circles that had transformed Paris. Haussmann died in 1891, but his influence continued as more boulevards, such as the Saint-Germain and Henri IV, were built, the Place de la République was reconfigured, the Opéra rose in the middle of its encircling roads, and in the emergence of new parks and handsome apartments. The façades of these were flat and harmonized in the Haussmann style and contained all kinds of miraculous conveniences like bathrooms, running water, gaslights, and central heating. Some 32 million visitors had attended the Exposition of 1889, the Eiffel Tower immediately became the symbol of the new Paris, and just as marvelous was the new underground railway with its sinuous Art Nouveau entrances designed by Hector Guimard. The cafés, the food, clothes, theatres, thés-dansants, opera, concerts, ballet, circuses, the plays, novels, poems, and musical compositions all testified to a new flowering of French genius, a new optimism, and a new pro
sperity.

  Most of all, Paris was a city of art and artists, “apt to strike the newcomer as being but one art studio,” May Alcott Nieriker wrote. “The combination of old and new building, the splendours of the new boulevards and the Bois de Boulogne, the profusion of cafés, the theatres, the contrasting opulence and seediness … the smells of the city … all these aspects … exerted a spell on visitors.” As part of their transforming revolution the Impressionists—Manet, Monet, Caillebotte, Cézanne, Degas, Morisot, Renoir, and Sisley—brought a new sense of daily life, real people in real situations. The year of Modigliani’s arrival Cézanne had just died—of hypothermia, after being caught in a storm at age sixty-seven—painters like Bonnard and Vuillard were developing their theories about flat planes of color, and an even more radical group, Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, and Rouault, had introduced their own movement at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. Their resulting canvases quickly earned them the name of “Les Fauves”—“Wild Beasts.” Picasso and his Cubistic conundrums were just around the corner.