Meryle Secrest

by Modigliani: A Life

  Thanks to the fame of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, artists from all over the world were drawn to the city’s schools, galleries, museums, and salons. Between 1870 and 1914 the number of artists living in Paris was said to have doubled; it was claimed that “there were more artists per square metre than in any location in the world.” Warshawsky, picking up the latest thinking from his fellow students, was told that Monet and his school had ruined all sense of form in their single-minded pursuit of the effects of light, or so it was claimed. Before he left New York Warshawsky believed that the work of Robert Henri was the very last word in daring and avant-garde insights; in Paris, poor Henri could not even find a gallery prepared to show his work, and he had been rejected by the latest Salon d’Automne.

  Scene outside the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt soon after Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906: a contemporary postcard (image credit 5.3)

  The Bois de Boulogne in 1905: a postcard (image credit 5.4)

  Even more than it is today, the life Modigliani found on his arrival was the life of the streets. Influenced as we are by the albumen prints of Eugène Atget made at the turn of the twentieth century to think of Paris in almost Surrealistic terms as a city full of deserted quais, empty chairs in the Tuileries, wet, winding cobblestone streets, and shuttered windows, the impression is deceptive. For the fact was that Atget made his living selling pictures of old Paris to artists and therefore set up his tripod and cameras before dawn, when nothing was stirring. Even so, somewhere in Paris someone was always awake. Anywhere near Les Halles the streets would be reverberating with the early sounds of delivery carts being hauled over the old stones, the shouts of drivers, the whinnying and snorting of the horses, the throngs of predawn buyers and sellers, and the groans of the porters, men who had proved their strength by carrying a wicker basket laden with two hundred kilos of cast iron for a distance of 250 meters. Only they had the right to unload but, on the other hand, they could get help from day laborers, called “coups de main,” who swarmed to Les Halles looking for work.

  There were daily deliveries that would surprise today’s city dweller, trained to forage for himself. First came the milkmen, well-built young men in blouses and tall caps with their milk cans, rattling along in their two-wheeled carts at four in the morning. Their appearance was the signal for street sweepers, men and women with highly desirable salaries of three francs a day, to arrive and begin raising their clouds of dust.

  At five o’clock small, sturdy women from the boulangeries in aprons and leg-of-mutton sleeves would begin their day by removing dozens of newly baked loaves of bread from the oven and loading them into covered delivery carts. Each loaf was hand-delivered to the door of every apartment, meaning that, in the course of a single morning, the women might be climbing some eighty flights of stairs. Then there were the lady newspaper sellers who received the morning’s news in great sheets, to be assembled into individual copies and neatly folded before they could be distributed by cyclists all over the neighborhood.

  As dawn broke, armies of workers filled the streets: the locksmiths in blue smocks, masons in white aprons, flower makers, metal burnishers, knife grinders, glaziers, fishmongers, the peddlers of old clothes and rabbit skins, the organ grinders and sellers of lampshades and umbrellas in their shabby coats and fedoras. There were legions of girls, usually in from the country, working that humble trade immortalized by Mimi in La Bohème. At the bottom of the heap were the “petites-mains,” young recruits who ran errands for the couturiers. Then came the dressmakers and milliners and, ascending the social scale, the typists working in banks and offices. Such sartorial niceties between the working classes animate The Colour of Paris, an illustrated historic and social guide published by the Académiciens Goncourt in 1924. The theme, what it was like to be young and hungry, underlies this account. “What can they do … to earn a living—that is, literally to escape dying of want?” the authors ask. “They are thankful to accept any kind of work. Some of them turn bagottiers, the name given to the poor wretches who run after cabs at the railway-stations in the hope of being allowed to lend a hand unloading the luggage, and who usually spend their breath for nothing; others cry the morning papers, which are distributed among them at the Croissant, at the rate of two francs fifty the hundred. Advertising agents hire some of them as sandwich-men … to announce new wares, and at such jobs they average thirty sous a day.” As for those pariahs of the needle, the makers of underclothing, if they were lucky enough to find any work at all, they earned one franc twenty-five centimes a day, that is to say, ten or twelve centimes an hour. Such were the harsh realities of being down and out in early-twentieth-century Paris.

  We may imagine Modigliani sauntering out of his comfortable hotel near the Madeleine, “poured into his clothes, with plenty of cuff on display,” as the poet Blaise Cendrars described him, strolling down the grands boulevards, humming and talking to himself occasionally, as André Breton did: “Toutes les rues sont des affluents / Quand on aime ce fleuve ou coule tout le sang de Paris.”

  He had signed up for classes at the Académie Colarossi in the rue de la Grande Chaumière, that street that would figure largely in the sad drama of his short life. The Colarossi, believed to be the oldest art school in the Quartier Latin, had attracted such pupils as Rodin, Whistler, and Gauguin and was favored by Ortiz de Zárate, who no doubt recommended it to Modigliani. Instruction was available, but most artists went there for the chance to draw from a model for a small fee. Marevna, a Russian artist who arrived in Paris in 1912, said the rooms were usually packed. Some of the models, usually Italians of all ages, were clothed, looking “out of their element in the chilly fog of Paris, most as though they had just disembarked from a voyage from Naples,” she wrote. Other rooms had nude models, so these tended to be overheated and stifling; “the model perspired heavily under the electric light, looking at times like a swimmer coming out of the sea. It was like an inferno, rank with the smells of perspiring bodies, scent and fresh paint, damp waterproofs [raincoats] and dirty feet, tobacco from cigarettes and pipes, but the industry with which we all worked had to be seen to be believed.”

  Other artists enrolled in the Académie Julian on the rue du Dragon, popular with Americans who could not meet the entrance requirements at the École des Beaux-Arts. After the future muralist George Biddle graduated from Harvard Law School in 1911 he went straight to art lessons at the Académie Julian. He wrote,

  The school was in an enormous hangar, a cold, filthy, uninviting firetrap. The walls were plastered from floor to ceiling with the prize-winning academies, in oil or charcoal, of the past thirty or forty years. The atmosphere of the place had changed little since the days of Delacroix, Ingres or David. Three nude girls were posing downstairs. The acrid smell of their bodies and the smell of the students mingled with that of turpentine and oil paint in the overheated, tobacco-laden air. The students grouped their stools and low easels close about the models’ feet. While they worked there was a pandemonium of songs, catcalls, whistling and recitations of a highly salacious and bawdy nature.

  In common with students from the Sorbonne, struggling artists, called “rapins,” wore Bohemian costumes of wide-brimmed felt hats or berets, cloaks, and peg-topped trousers. Art was in an uproar. Everyone was looking for the next style, but no one was quite sure which one would become the rage. “Between the pitiless iconoclasts and the defenders of the old order there was a small band of artists who tried to find a line of compromise,” Warshawsky wrote.

  One of their favorite devices was to paint a blue line around everything and it was strange to see how even a very academic painting could snap up with this blue outline.

  But the younger element, in their mania to emphasize form, set out to deliberately distort it. Horrible monsters, with arms and legs in the last stage of elephantiasis, colored in crude green, violet or scarlet, were painted from slim, delicate, ivory-tinted models. Agonizing landscapes with writhing, reeling forms, as if afflicted with t
he dance of St. Vitus, were hailed by critics as symphonies of rhythm and plastic design. Totems and idols of jungle Africa were studied and imitated.

  Meantime Modigliani was at work. In those days he was painting very small portraits on rough canvas or smooth card with thin colors, Ludwig Meidner recalled.

  The results, which recalled somewhat Toulouse-Lautrec or, in their gray-green tones, Whistler’s works, were markedly different from the pictures of the Fauves, which could be viewed at the exhibitions of the Indépendants. They had style and, compared to the latter, were measured and refined in both color and draftsmanship. In order to give these pictures depth and transparency Modi covered them when they were dry with colored varnish, to such an extent that some pictures were covered with ten coats of varnish and, with their transparent golden appearance, recalled the Old Masters.

  He had produced enough of these early portraits to have three of them on display in December of 1906 at Laura Wylda’s art gallery at the corner of the rue des Saints-Pères and the boulevard Saint-Germain. In his autobiography, Pane e luna, the artist Anselmo Bucci wrote that they were hallucinatory portraits of women with bloodless faces in a limited, almost monochromatic palette of reddish browns. None of them sold. Modigliani painted two portraits of Meidner and eventually exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants but, his sitter remarked drily, “they went largely unnoticed.”

  Modigliani was drawing continually, one of his sitters being Mado, a blond washerwoman who had been one of Picasso’s models. Meidner was intrigued by Modigliani’s practical and inventive approach to drawing. “He drew from life on thin paper, but before it was finished he placed another white sheet beneath it and a piece of graphite paper between the two; then he traced the drawing, greatly simplifying the lines … Whereas in later years he developed his own style of painting, his drawing remained essentially unchanged. Once he set to it, he could produce dozens of portraits in this way.”

  Bucci was intrigued enough by Modigliani’s painting in Laura Wylda’s window to go looking for their author and found him at the Hotel Bouscarat in Montmartre. Bucci was accompanied by a couple of friends, and Modigliani responded at once, hurtling down a steep staircase. “Here was a young man wearing a cyclist’s red sweater, small, gay and smiling, with a splendid set of teeth and a mop of curly hair,” Bucci wrote. The first thing Modigliani wanted to know was, were they all Italian painters? Bucci was already mentally cataloging his looks: “Young Jews often have classically shaped, even Roman heads; this was the head of Antinous”—a reference to a youth of such beauty and grace he became a favorite of the Roman Emperor Hadrian’s and was later deified.

  The three men started arguing almost at once. There was not a single decent painter in Italy, Modigliani said, with the exception of Oscar Ghiglia. As for France there was Matisse, Picasso, and, Modigliani almost said, “There is me,” but did not quite. Bucci used to meet him at the Café Vachette, where they went to get warm, listen to jazz, and draw. Modigliani drew all the time and would study Bucci’s folio with a seriousness and attention that the artist had seldom received from anyone. They were almost friends, but not quite, perhaps unconsciously competitive. “There was always between us a certain smile, typically Livornese, that was icy cold.”

  Modigliani had, of course, visited all the museums and an exhibition of the Fauves at the Salon d’Automne, where he was greatly impressed by the works of Gauguin. But, Ludwig Meidner wrote, “Modi was also interested in Whistler and his fine grey tones, even though the painter was no longer in the public eye. He also admired Ensor and Munch, who were almost unknown in Paris, and of the younger artists he preferred Picasso, Matisse, Rouault and some of the young Hungarian Expressionists who were just coming into fashion.”

  His friends were, for the most part, those artists he had already met in Florence and Venice. Besides Bucci, one of his new friends was Gino Severini, who met him by chance outside the Moulin de la Galette. Severini recalls that Modigliani’s search for style was as unsatisfactory as anyone else’s. “Naturally, our conversations centred on the artistic preoccupations of the period,” Severini wrote. “Impressionism no longer satisfied [us]; Picasso was too much of an intellectual … all this gave rise to much discussion. Modi never agreed with anyone. And in particular, he didn’t agree with Futurism. Futurism was based on color relationships, on a certain impressionism. Modigliani didn’t give a damn about all that. He was interested in the Genovese primitives, in Negro art, in the Venetians.”

  By the early winter of 1906 Modigliani had moved from the Madeleine to the Bouscarat, at the very center of the artists’ quarter, the Place du Tertre in Montmartre. He rented a separate studio nearby at 7 Place Jean-Baptiste Clément. Several people remembered that studio, Severini among them. He wrote, “From the rue Lepic you could see a sort of greenhouse or glass cage on the top of a wall at the end of a garden. It was a small studio, but very pleasant. The two sides that were glazed meant that it could serve equally as a greenhouse or a studio without being precisely either. Anyway, Modigliani had arrived in Paris with a little more money than me, so he had been able to set up this small establishment, not very comfortable but adequate. He was not at all satisfied with it himself, though, and to tell the truth I liked my own sixth floor better.”

  The description, harmless as it is, makes one wonder how one can believe anything that has been written about Modigliani. This was a dwelling that others describe as lacking a single redeeming feature except, perhaps, for a cherry tree in the rue Lepic that one could see from a window. The studio was in the Maquis, a warren of back streets off the main square, of the kind described by Émile Zola in L’Argent, “wretched huts made of earth, old boards, and used zinc, like so many heaps of debris arrayed around an inner courtyard.” Rag and bone men lived there along with dealers in used furniture, foundry workers, and artists, who had moved in en masse, given the rock-bottom rents, and if only temporarily, since the slums were being cleared for new apartment buildings.

  André Warnod described the Maquis as “a vast space covered with sheds made from recovered materials, scrap ends of wood, old planks, metal gratings and tinplate, all of it looking ready to collapse at a single push.” Summer would place a merciful blanket over the piles of rubbish with scrub, weeds, a few wildflowers, and the distant cherry tree. There Modigliani lived with a few humble possessions. Louis Latourette, a poet and financial journalist, described the interior. “The shanty was in a state of wild disorder. The walls were covered with sketches, a few canvases lay on the floor, and in the corners were several sculptures. The furniture consisted of a couple of rush-bottom chairs—one with its back broken—a makeshift bed, a trunk used as a seat, and a tin basin and jug in one corner.” Similarly Meidner described Modigliani’s studio as “a tumbledown shack on a treeless, ugly scrap of ground, and although it was furnished in the most spartan manner, oppressive and neglected like a beggar’s hovel, one was always glad to go there for one found an artistic atmosphere in which one was never bored.” His host painted the cherry tree, one of the famous lost paintings. Supposedly Modigliani took it with him when he set off on his endless search for temporary quarters, and at some point it disappeared.

  What Meidner remembered best were so many evenings that winter when they used to meet in a dark Bohemian café on the Butte Montmartre called the Lapin Agile. “For four sous you could sit there with a cup of strong coffee and engage in heated discussions about art until dawn. As day broke we would go home through the narrow lanes.” This, for Meidner, was the crowning glory of life in Paris. He would, he wrote, never experience anything like it again.

  CHAPTER 6

  La Vie de Bohème

  Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est là,

  Simple et tranquille!

  —PAUL VERLAINE

  THE LAPIN AGILE, a combination café and watering hole on the steep northern slopes of the Butte Montmartre, played a pivotal role as a meeting place for artists at the start of the twentieth century. At the inters
ection of the rue Saint-Vincent and the rue des Saules, its origins went back for centuries, and in previous years the rustic cottage that became a tavern had appealed to the Bohemian students of the Romantic movement. With its outdoor terrace, its fresh air, its superb views over the city, and its historic associations, the louche charms of the café, once called Les Assassins, seemed the embodiment of Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème.

  By 1903 the café was in danger of being demolished to make way for speculative development. Aristide Bruant, the cabaret singer whom Toulouse-Lautrec had immortalized, bought it. Bruant commissioned a comic artist, André Gill, to paint a suitable scene, that of a rabbit wearing a sash, bow tie, and porkpie hat, balancing a wine bottle, and jumping out of a frying pan. That was the “Lapin à Gill,” Gill’s rabbit, which soon became the “Lapin Agile,” a name that suited it just as well. Bruant knew everybody and quite soon everybody arrived. Along with the small-time criminals who had frequented Les Assassins, there were poets like Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob, writers like Francis Carco and André Salmon, and, most of all, artists: Picasso, Braque, Derain, Vlaminck, Valadon, Utrillo, Gris, and so many others. With his usual perspicacity Modigliani at once attached himself to the list.