Meryle Secrest

by Modigliani: A Life

  Cabaret du Lapin Agile (image credit 6.1)

  Returning years later, Carco would discover that not much had changed. “Here behind the wall of the old Calvary graveyard are the big trees, whose leaves in autumn covered the illustrious slabs and fell into our glasses. Here are the innumerable lights of Paris and the same wind which makes them twinkle as before.”

  Recollection had transformed what was a modest dwelling, hardly more than a single large room with a low ceiling, some long rough tables, and wooden chairs, into a magical space. The Lapin Agile would become part of the “true” Montmartre before the tourists arrived, where the meaning of art was earnestly debated, where poems were recited, songs were sung, and the last guests left at dawn. Carco wrote, “And indeed, under the lamps veiled with red silk handkerchiefs,…where Frédéric sang, who did not feel as if drugged with some powerful opiate? No dream nor pleasure even approaches that sensation … A very special sort of intoxication, mixed with fancies and depression, uncertain and voiceless … It really rained on those nights, while the drunkest lay stretched upon the benches and innocent white mice, friendly yet cautious, trotted along the mantelpiece.”

  Part of the allure was provided by the proprietor, Frédéric Gérard, known as Frédé, a man of unsuspected talents who began on the street selling fish before scraping together enough money to buy a small cabaret and then the Lapin Agile. Frédé had an unkempt beard, straggling hair shoved under a fur hat, a sweater, and boots, and was essentially a cabaret artist. Le Zut, his previous nightspot, had been frequented by the young Picasso, who had helped whitewash the walls. One night after several sangrias Picasso had painted a mural, the Temptation of St. Anthony. When Frédé set himself up in a new location, Picasso came with him. Frédé would play and sing, his daughter would pass the hat, and bit by bit the walls would fill up with paintings, the accepted unit of exchange for artists down on their luck. Picasso contributed Arlequin et sa compagne, there were some early Utrillos, drawings by Steinlen, a statue of Apollo Musagetes, a Hindu God, and a gritty anonymous sculpture of Christ on the cross that everyone autographed. Frédé was the soul of good humor, greeted each arrival by name, and would invariably wish his regulars a good digestion. This, Philippe Jullian quipped, they needed in order to “swallow his special cocktail, a mixture of Pernod and grenadine.”

  Nina Hamnett, the English sculptor, recalled that they drank kirsch with small plums inside and, although she conceded Frédé played a fine guitar, was one of those who did not warm to him and always ended up in an argument whenever she went to the Lapin Agile. It would seem that the portrait of Frédé, as fondly delineated, has been extensively retouched.

  “The picture of ‘le brave Frédé’ that emerges from the more nostalgic memoirs of the period—singing his famous repertory of street songs, playing the cello, clarinet and guitar by ear … baking pottery in his kiln, helping his Burgundian wife … serve up appetizing dinners (wine included) for two francs a head and being a supportive father-figure to one and all—is too good to be true,” John Richardson wrote. “ ‘Frédé was a ruffian,’ Picasso said.” And if Frédé one day succumbed to the lure of tourism and selling cheap souvenirs, he had at least given the artists of Montmartre some unforgettable memories. Part of the café’s charm, Carco continued, “came from the surroundings of confused bric-à-brac, from the obscene mouldings, from the immense plaster Christ, from Picasso’s canvases, Utrillo’s, Girieud’s … And Frédéric with his guitar … the dampness of the walls, the hidden despair of us all, our poverty, our youth, wasted time, completed the atmosphere.”

  A typical evening at the Lapin Agile (image credit 6.2)

  Modigliani, making himself a part of the new crowd with ease, had the rare gift of being perfectly delighted in any company. One sees this in a series of candid camera photographs taken by Cocteau during World War I and published by Billy Klüver and Julie Martin in Kiki’s Paris. Modigliani is all eager attentiveness as Picasso explains a joke to André Salmon to which, no doubt, he is about to add an irresistible coda. This ability to make friends was a consequence, perhaps, of having grown up in his mother’s “smala,” when one never knew which relative or dear friend might be sitting down to dinner with the family or have arrived for an indefinite stay. Modigliani is the subject of so many accounts, as he meets a friend by chance, or appears at a sidewalk table, or invites a third to his studio and a fourth to a musicale, that one believes he was seldom alone.

  Meidner wrote, “At this time he was not … the gloomy, cynical and sarcastic person his biographer [Arthur] Pfannstiel describes, but rather lively and enthusiastic, always sparkling, full of imagination, wit and contradictory moods … I was overwhelmed by his open attitude towards everything, in particular whenever he spoke about beauty. Never before had I heard an artist speak with such ardor.”

  The writer Ilya Ehrenburg thought his work showed “a rare combination of childlikeness and wisdom. When I say ‘childlike’ I do not, of course, mean infantilism, a native lack of ability or a deliberate primitivism: by childlikeness I mean freshness of perception, immediacy, inner purity.” “I can see Modigliani now,” Maurice de Vlaminck wrote in 1925, five years after his death, “sitting at a table in the Café de la Rotonde. I can see his pure Roman profile, his look of authority; I can also see his fine hands, aristocratic hands with sensitive fingers—intelligent hands, unhesitatingly outlining a drawing with a single stroke.” Gino Severini said, “He did not need stimulants to be brilliant, alive and full of interest every moment of his life. Everyone loved Modigliani.”

  In those days artists were expected not only to dress distinctively—hence the uniform of “les rapins,” with their corduroy trousers and capes—but set the fashion. Picasso inspired a rash of early imitators with his pair of faded and patched blue overalls, red-and-white-dotted cotton shirt, espadrilles, and cap. Quite soon after arriving in Paris Modigliani seems to have abandoned his expensively correct clothes for something more appropriate. He chose a suit of chocolate-brown corduroy with a matching vest, an open-necked shirt, and a red kerchief. It was, in fact, an outfit that harked back half a century, since the sculptor Auguste Clesinger (1814–1883), who was photographed by Nadar in 1860, was wearing the identical outfit.

  Roger Wild described the effect as somewhat careless but with calculated intent. There was the suit of faded velvet, the shirt of blue and white check, “the only one he owned but that he washed out every night, and a tie that was always awry. He would have found it shocking, it seems, to wear a tie on straight like the rest of the world.” Still there was something about him, an eclectic kind of style setting, according to a friend quoted in Artist Quarter. “He was the first man in Paris to wear a shirt made of cretonne … He had colour harmonies that were all his own.” Picasso did not hide his admiration for Modigliani’s sartorial style. “There’s only one man in Paris who knows how to dress and that is Modigliani.” Abdul Wahab, another artist in Modigliani’s circle, recalls that Picasso and his friends were seated at a sidewalk café when they saw Modigliani approaching. He was with a friend not known for his sartorial attention to detail. Picasso said, “Look at the difference between a gentleman and a parvenu.” He was, Jean Cocteau wrote, “our aristocrat.”

  The “true Montmartre” in which Modigliani found himself in 1906 was still, in all essential respects, a village. It was one that Haussmann’s zeal to obliterate had spared, and was being minutely documented by Eugène Atget at a moment when the buildings were in a picturesque state of decay, old windmills still dotted the landscape, its slopes were still covered with grape vines and vegetables, and nights were absolutely silent. By the time Modigliani arrived anyone who was anyone, with the exception of Vlaminck and Pierre Matisse, was already living there. Marcel Duchamp, Jean Renoir, and Théophile Alexandre Steinlen lived on the rue Caulaincourt. Edgar Degas was on the rue de Laval, Pierre Bonnard on the rue de Douai, André Derain on the rue de Tourlaque, Marie Laurencin on the rue Léonie, Georges Braque on the
rue d’Orsel, and Francis Picabia on the rue Hégésippe Moreau. Picasso, Kees van Dongen, and Juan Gris were living in the Bateau Lavoir. This squalid tenement began life as a piano factory and, later, a locksmith’s workshop, before being turned into artists’ quarters in 1889. The Bateau Lavoir was, presumably, so-called after the laundry boats moored along the Seine that always smelled of wet, dirty clothes. Philippe Jullian wrote, “[T]he huge building, with walls made of brick and timber pierced by enormous windows, was on four floors built against the side of the Butte, facing a narrow courtyard flanked on its other side by a blackened retaining wall.” Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, observed, “The place was so jerry-built that the walls oozed moisture … hence a prevailing smell of mildew, cat piss and drains … On a basement landing was the one and only toilet, a dark and filthy hole with an unlockable door … and next to it, the one and only tap.” But the rent was cheap—only fifteen francs a month, compared to one franc a night for the most modest hotel, and Picasso moved in. Later, so would Modigliani.

  The Bateau Lavoir, Montmartre (image credit 6.3)

  The rue des Saules, Montmartre (image credit 6.4)

  Most of the young and aspiring tenants of the Bateau Lavoir were inured by conditions which, in the days before plumbing and central heating, were common, even in middle-class habitations. What counted most was seeing and being seen, within walking distance of those impromptu meeting places and vital centers of warmth, the Chats Noirs and Lapins Agiles of the shifting moment. Besides, despite the builders, Montmartre was still a village, albeit an ancient one, inhabited since pre-Roman times. After the Romans moved in they erected temples to their gods. In the Middle Ages abbeys were built there, including windmills that were ecclesiastical property, and it was probably then that the Mont des Martyrs, or Hill of Martyrs, acquired its name. Montmartre also became associated with the underworld as a consequence of the gypsum quarries that had been worked since the sixteenth century. By the nineteenth the hillsides were riddled with labyrinths, an ideal refuge for rogues and vagabonds. On the outskirts of Paris, but a part of it: Montmartre was the refuge of nonconformists and rebels, the indigent, the working poor, and all the other untouchables.

  After 1860 when the commune of Montmartre became incorporated into Paris, a raffish bunch of musicians, painters, and poets arrived, attracted by the light and the cheap rents. “It was in Montmartre that the cult of the artist, the artistic manner evolved from the writings of Baudelaire, developed,” Jullian wrote. “The artist had none of the preciosity of the Anglo-Saxon aesthete; he had a taste for Beauty certainly, but he was free to find that beauty in scenes of misery and among the dregs of humanity.” Of course, they all knew each other. “Montmartre was, above all else, a society of friends; everyone was in and out of each other’s houses all the time and the girls [models] went from one studio to another.”

  The exact moment at which Modigliani left his hotel, the Bouscarat on the Place du Tertre, and moved into his shed in the Maquis, has not been recorded, although it must have happened sometime in 1907. André Utter, an amateur painter who married Utrillo’s mother, Suzanne Valadon, met Modigliani one day by chance. He was outside painting a street scene when Modigliani walked up to him and started talking. In the course of the conversation Modigliani said he had just returned from London, which would put the probable date as late in 1907, and even claimed to have exhibited with the Pre-Raphaelites.

  It appeared that Modigliani was penniless and his bill at the hotel weeks or months in arrears. The proprietor was holding his paintings as security, and Modigliani did not know what to do. In short, his days as a young man of means were ending. It is repeatedly asserted that Modigliani was a spendthrift. Although so many claims about his behavior are suspect, this one rings true, if only because of his family’s history and the Garsin predilection for taking advantage of good times and drowning in debt in lean ones. Breeding, bearing, seigneurial largesse—these were the lessons they had imparted. Prudence was not one of them. So Amedeo spent with a free hand and endured when he did not. On the other hand, times of want called for ingenuity and planning, in which he was also schooled. An early lesson arrived fortuitously at the Bouscarat. One night the ceiling plaster of his room fell on his bed with a crash. He was unhurt. But Modigliani, at his most ingenious and inventive at such moments, talked about head injuries and the prospect of lawsuits. The proprietor said, “Oh get to hell out of it and take your rotten junk with you.” This wonderful piece of luck never happened again, but it gave Modigliani an idea.

  It seems that Modigliani was never actually destitute since Eugénie and Mené contributed a small stipend. Even so he often went hungry. To have reached the limit of one’s resources was described in 1903 by James Joyce. He wrote from Paris: “Dear Mother, Your order for 3s 4d of Tuesday last was very welcome as I had been without food for 42 hours. Today I am twenty hours without food. But these spells of fasting are common with me now and when I get your money I am so damnably hungry that I eat a fortune (1/-) before you could say knife … If I had money I could buy a little oil stove (I have a lamp) and cook macaroni for myself with bread when I am hard beat.” Joyce’s attempt to find fame and fortune in Paris ended when, two months later, he returned to Ireland for his mother’s funeral.

  Before he became well known, Carco knew more tricks than Joyce did on how to survive in Paris. For instance, L’Intransigeant was the preferred newspaper for stuffing mattresses because it had six more pages than the other dailies. As for breakfast, the trick was to creep into buildings just after the morning milk and rolls had been delivered but before the owners were awake. Finding lunch and dinner was harder even if you were prepared to root around in the gutters of Les Halles after the morning’s market. On the other hand, food was cheap, and three francs a day, the wage paid to municipal street sweepers, was a fortune. Carco wrote, “In the Rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, where … I … was learning to set type and print books … meals cost twelve sous. Bread, ten centimes; meat, thirty centimes; vegetables, fifteen; hot chocolate, one sou, so that from three francs there was enough left for luxury.” Nevertheless the cheapest meal costs too much when you have no money. Modigliani had a solution for that.

  The uncharming Rosalie Tobia enters the story at this point. She had posed in the nude for Bouguereau, Carolus Durand, and Cabanel and had lovers. At that stage it was impossible to imagine since she was completely shapeless, with sagging breasts, a dirty dress, and some sort of net or Neapolitan kerchief covering her stringy hair. Rosalie was owner of a tiny restaurant, Chez Rosalie, on the rue Campagne Première, narrow, smoky, and dimly lit, reeking of boiled cabbage, which she ran with her son Luigi. While she stirred the soup with a wooden ladle, Luigi, in shirt sleeves and wrapped in a blue apron, would be drying glasses and dishes with a filthy rag.

  Chez Rosalie advertised itself as a crémerie, serving café au lait and chocolate, but was, in effect, a kind of personal charity. Rosalie would trudge to Les Halles before dawn each morning to buy the day’s provisions, returning on the Métro with a sack on her back. She had a quick temper, one that concealed a warm heart. Any stray dog or cat at the door was sure of a meal. She also fed mice and the rats in nearby stables, to the exasperation of her neighbors. Starving artists were another specialty. She would assemble a group at one of her four marble-topped tables, disappear into her minute kitchen, and appear with an enormous bowl of steaming spaghetti, then bang it down in the middle of the table. There would be cheap wine and few leftovers. Those who could pay, did. Those who could not, ate anyway.

  Lunia Czechowska, who knew Modigliani in the last years of his life, explained that Rosalie had her protégés but Modigliani was in a category all his own, “her god.” He liked the Italian dishes she favored with plenty of oil and would say, “When I eat an oily dish it’s like kissing the mouth of a woman I love.” If he had nowhere to stay he would bed down on sacks in the back and, on good days, help Rosalie peel the potatoes and string the beans. On b
ad days, she would try to get him to pay his bill and he would reply, “A man who has no money shouldn’t die of hunger.” That would start a fight. “Dishes and glasses would be thrown and sometimes Modigliani would rip his drawings off the wall,” Martin and Klüver wrote. According to Czechowska, Modigliani’s solution would be to start talking in French, which Rosalie barely spoke, and that would end the matter.

  Chez Rosalie, where Modigliani could always be sure of getting a meal (image credit 6.5)

  Payment was simple: another drawing, Rosalie complaining all the time that she had too many already. The legend, probably true, is that she kept them, covered with grease, in a kitchen cupboard, the rats gnawed away at them, and when she thought of cashing them in it was too late. But then, art appreciation was hardly Rosalie’s strong point, despite the Modiglianis, Kislings, Picassos, Utrillos, and the like on the yellow-stained walls. Marevna tells the story that, to atone for some of those free meals, Modigliani once painted a fresco on one of her walls. Rosalie was so disgusted that, next day, she made Luigi cover it up with white paint.

  Rosalie (image credit 6.6)

  Modigliani’s descent from comparative wealth into want, like that of his parents some twenty years before, was enough for friends to notice but an indignity he endured in silence. Meidner wrote, “Modigliani seemed to be in the direst of financial straits. I often heard him barter with his acquaintances on this account, but we never discussed money. Although I was not badly off at this time Modigliani never addressed such requests to me—I don’t know why. He was very proud in this respect. A year later, when his plight was quite desperate, he would absent himself for days on end in order to find some money, either by selling his drawings or by selling the works of another artist to a dealer.” Perhaps some artist’s model would take pity on him and stand him a drink or dinner. In the meantime he lived where he could for as long as he could, choosing the right psychological moment to disappear into the night. He would surface in a new quarter, with a new landlord, a new address, and a fresh neighborhood of restaurants where he could run up more bills. Researchers are still trying to list all his addresses and puzzle out the reason why he moved so often, which would have given him a laugh.