Louis Latourette provides an invaluable insight into the life of the young man with whom he strolled the boulevards in 1906–07. “As we left the restaurant I was astounded to see [that my companion] was carrying a copy of a book by [a philosopher], Le Dantec,” Latourette wrote. “ ‘I adore philosophy,’ he told me. ‘It’s in my blood,’ ” explaining the family legend that put him in a direct line with Spinoza.
“In the course of a long evening walk on the terrace of the Sacré-Coeur, he recited numerous passages from Leopardi, Carducci and above all the Laudi of d’Annunzio, about which he was passionate. Then he launched into an ostentatious discussion of the works of Shelley and Wilde.” (This, it should be noted, was a conversation with a poet.) “There wasn’t a single word about painting,” Latourette said.
Another friend, Roberto Rossi, who became a well-known sculptor in Italy, discovered Modigliani’s equal responsiveness to music. Rossi said, “I would often go to the ‘Concerts Rouges’ in the rue de Tournon. You could listen to the program there for 1 franc 25.” One evening soon after his arrival in Paris, he happened to be sitting near Modigliani for a program of the music of Boccherini. “We quickly realized we were from the same country. When Modigliani and I were together we spoke our Italian, flavored with Florentine expressions … Our first conversation was as much about friends we had in common in Florence as it was about the music of Boccherini. I would tell he had a deep sensibility by the way he half-closed his eyes when he spoke about the music.”
Modigliani was sure of his talent but had not yet found a sense of direction. Louis Latourette thought he might even have been disoriented by the multiple possibilities. When the poet went to visit the painter, the studio was in chaos, its walls covered with canvases, its floors littered with paper, and boxes overflowing with drawings. Modigliani’s mood was despairing: he was going to throw everything out. Perhaps it was the fault of his Italian eye; he could not get used to the subtle watercolor light of Paris. “You can’t imagine how many times I’ve started again with themes in violet, orange and deep ochre.” Max Jacob, a poet and writer who was also an artist, understood why Modigliani was struggling. What he was seeking was perfection itself. He wrote, “Everything in Dedo tended towards purity in art … a need for crystalline purity, a trueness to himself in life as in art…[T]hat was very characteristic of the period, which talked of nothing but purity in art and strove for nothing else.”
Among the litter was a piece of sculpture, the torso of a young girl; it reminded Latourette of an actress who used to recite Rollinat’s verses at the Lapin Agile. Modigliani treated it with scorn. “It’s nothing! Imitation Picasso, a wash-out. Picasso would kick this monstrosity to pieces.” But a few days later, when Modigliani announced that he had destroyed almost everything except for a few drawings, Latourette noted that the sculpture had been saved. Modigliani was half thinking of giving up painting and going back to sculpture. Curiously enough, the young Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was coming to the same conclusion at about the same moment. “Painting is too complicated with its oils and its pigments, and is too easily destroyed,” he wrote to a friend. “What is more, I love the sense of creation, the ample voluptuousness of kneading the material and bringing forth life, a joy which I never found in painting; for, as you have seen, I don’t know how to manipulate colour, and as I’ve always said, I’m not a painter, but a sculptor…[S]culpture is the art of expressing the reality of ideas in the most palpable form.”
Unlike Gaudier-Brzeska, Modigliani did not work from clay but directly from stone in the Italian style. Still, one may assume he shared similar sentiments. He wanted sculptural density and weight, he wanted roundness and monumentality, the exhilaration of creation and the feeling of the stone against his hand. He had begun experimenting again in that direction, his invariable plan being to court the masons working on new buildings over a bottle of wine and then make off with a block of stone. He was not yet ready to concentrate on sculpture alone; that would take another two or three years. Meantime he began to refine his already formidable techniques for eating without paying.
Gino Severini, the Futurist painter, recalled that he was having dinner one evening in a Montmartre café when Modigliani appeared, sans le sou and looking very hungry. Severini invited him to join him, and Modigliani ordered a meal. Severini, however, had no money either and was eating on credit. As the end of the meal approached Severini became more and more anxious. What was he to do? Modigliani knew him well enough to know that, once under the influence, Severini would collapse with laughter. So Modigliani quietly slipped him a small amount of hashish. It was an instant success. When the bill was presented Severini immediately saw the funny side. He smirked, he giggled, he let out a belly laugh. It really was a joke. It was a riot. He cried with laughter. He was doubled up. He almost rolled on the floor. Evidence that he made a total spectacle of himself was not long in coming; the owner threw them both out.
At that moment Modigliani was exhibiting, trying to sell his work, and looking for a dealer. No longer was the Salon, that fortress of the artistic establishment, the only place an artist could exhibit, or even the Salon des Réfusés, established by the Impressionists in the 1860s. Now there was the Salon des Indépendants, established by such artists as Georges Seurat, Odilon Redon, and Paul Signac. And there was yet another anti-establishment venue, the Salon d’Automne. The creation of a prominent architect and writer, Fritz Jourdain, the Salon d’Automne attracted a socially prominent crowd when it opened its doors in October 1903. At the Petit Palais, Proust, in white tie and tails, mingled with the politician Léon Blum and the aristocratic Comtesse de Noailles. It was a success on every count and became at once a major goal of every young unknown. In 1907 the Salon accepted seven works by Modigliani: the portrait of Meidner, a Study of a Head, and five watercolors.
Again, nothing sold. But in this case, it hardly mattered. The event also exhibited forty-eight oils by Cézanne, the master of Aix who had died the year before. His watercolors were concurrently on view at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. Modigliani was taken by storm. “Whenever Cézanne’s name was mentioned, a reverent expression would come over Modigliani’s face,” Alfred Werner wrote. “He would, with a slow and secretive gesture, take from his pocket a reproduction of ‘Boy With Red Vest,’ hold it up to his face like a breviary, draw it to his lips and kiss it.” That was the year that Modigliani visited Picasso’s studio in the Bateau Lavoir and saw Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, historically considered the birth of Cubism. The painting of four naked whores in a brothel met with puzzled incomprehension when it was first viewed. Richardson wrote, “Although friends sympathized with his aspirations, none of them was capable of understanding the pictorial form that these aspirations took. When he allowed Salmon, Apollinaire and Jacob to see the painting, they … took refuge in embarrassed silence.” Modigliani admired Picasso without reservation. “How great he is,” he once remarked. “He’s always ten years ahead of the rest of us.”
The fact that, unlike Picasso, who was only three years older, his work was not selling, did not disturb Modigliani, at least not outwardly. After his older brother Umberto, now on an engineer’s salary, sent him some money, Modigliani’s letter of thanks was calm and optimistic. “The Salon d’Automne has been a comparative success and acceptance en bloc, practically speaking, was a rare occurrence since these people form a closed clique,” he wrote. He hoped to exhibit at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1908. “If I give as good an account of myself at the Indépendants I shall certainly have taken a first step forward.”
Noël Alexandre is a middle son, one of eleven children of Dr. Paul Alexandre, who saw Modigliani almost every day in the years leading up to World War I, as friend, confidant, and his first collector. Noël Alexandre is also author of a landmark study, The Unknown Modigliani, Drawings from the Collection of Paul Alexandre, that accompanied an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1994. The exhibition was in the nature of a revelation since
it not only showed some four hundred drawings that had never been exhibited before, but contained previously unknown letters, photographs, an account of Modigliani’s life sent by his mother in 1924, letters from Jean, Paul Alexandre’s brother, Paul Alexandre’s own letters and reminiscences, and a totally fresh view of Modigliani’s personality and the development of his talents.
One spring day I was invited for lunch in the country house in suburban Paris owned by Noël Alexandre and his wife, Colette Comoy-Alexandre. We lunched in their light, airy living room, its French windows opening onto a country garden with apple blossoms scenting the air. The lilacs were in bloom and Colette Comoy had placed vases of them ascending the steps of a curving staircase. It was the first of what would become several illuminating encounters in which Noël Alexandre explained that the “legend” of Modigliani had led him to revisit the story from the beginning. These stories were canards, completely at odds with everything he had learned from his father. He was determined to destroy the false image of Modigliani that had been created down through the decades.
Colette Comoy-Alexandre in her country garden, Sceaux, outside Paris (image credit 6.7)
Paul Alexandre, born in 1881, was the son of Jean-Baptiste, a prosperous pharmacist living in an hôtel particulier in Paris that has since become an embassy. (The address then was 13 avenue Malakoff, now avenue Raymond Poincaré.) He and his younger brothers, Pierre and Jean, went to a Jesuit College in the rue de Madrid. Paul became a dermatologist and Jean, a pharmacist like their father. Paul’s interest in art began at an early age. He loved visiting the Louvre, and when his parents decided to redecorate their large living room Paul persuaded them to employ Geo Printemps, a young artist friend of his. Printemps brought someone with him to help, a budding sculptor named Maurice Drouard. Paul and Maurice became fast friends, and the young medical student was embarked on the other passion of his life, art, and artists.
Through Drouard, Paul Alexandre met a whole group of painters and sculptors that included Henri Doucet, Albert Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, and, in particular, the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who was to play an important role in Modigliani’s life. In those days Paul Alexandre was renting a room in the rue Visconti and sharing it with two brothers of a friend from the Jesuit College, Louis de Saint-Albin. This was fun, if a bit cramped, so they used to meet at a café nearby, Mauguin’s in the rue de Buci, which was famous for its two-centime coffee and usually jammed. Then Paul Alexandre had the idea of renting a private room on the first floor of a nearby restaurant and inviting his friends there once a week. After awhile that was too small as well. Then Paul Alexandre decided to rent a house.
Noël Alexandre, a son of Paul Alexandre, Modigliani’s first patron (image credit 6.8)
Noël Alexandre said, “My parents had the first floor on the avenue Malakoff [American second]. My grandmother was on the second floor. We children had the third floor, and on the fourth, there was an enormous salon with grand pianos at either end where my father’s friends would come to practice for their concerts. It was a liberal atmosphere but still, my father was living with his parents. When one is between twenty and thirty, one wants to be a bit more independent.”
Then, in 1907, Paul Alexandre discovered a pavillon at 7 rue du Delta. Thanks to his collection of photographs, just what the house looked like has been preserved in handsome detail and is revealed as a picturesque two-story semiruin. Its twelve rooms and floor-to-ceiling shuttered windows were oriented toward a plot of wasteland fenced off from the street. The house was owned by the city of Paris and was slated to be demolished. Paul Alexandre pulled some strings and rented it for a trifling sum for the next six years. It evidently represented a retreat and an escape, but it was more than that. Perhaps it was the discovery of just how desperate for money young artists could be that influenced him. The young doctor, gregarious by nature, in love with art and generous in spirit, created a meeting place for artists who came and went, knowing they had a place out of the rain, a bottle of wine, a meal, and somewhere to sleep, even if it was only the floor.
The young doctor Paul Alexandre in 1909 (image credit 6.9)
The first tenants, Drouard and Doucet, stayed on and on, Drou-ard until 1913. They brought Centore and he brought another sculptor, Guiraud Rivière. Gleizes, who fell out with his wealthy parents, arrived accompanied by some expensive-looking furniture. By then Paul Alexandre had started a clinic in a working-class part of Paris five minutes from the house. Even though a dermatologist, he wrote that “I was called out for anything. I used to be astonished at the maturity of the youngsters in this district, who played in the gutters but who, when their parents were ill, knew how to adopt adult language to fetch me and speak to the doctor. Then they would go back to their gutters.” Every moment not spent caring for the sick was devoted to the rue du Delta.
There were “Delta Saturdays” when everyone came. There were chess games and gatherings with plenty of high-minded talk. Little by little the wasteland behind the house was cleared, tables and chairs set out, flowering vines climbed the walls, and there was a stab at a lawn. There were plays, film scenarios, and racy theatricals in which Raymonde, wearing a saucy pair of high boots and nothing else, appeared from behind a curtain at the bidding of Alexandre’s baton. There were “pagan dances” with the sheets from Drouard’s or Alexandre’s bed that Brancusi in particular enjoyed. There were readings of Villon, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Baudelaire and afterward Alexandre would analyze what it all meant. There were musicales, and each year’s “Quatz’ Arts” costume ball called for months of preparation.
A theatrical evening at the rue du Delta; Paul Alexandre, at right, is master of ceremonies. A study for Modigliani’s The Cellist is on the wall above; from left, Luci and Henri Gazan (on the sofa), and Henri Doucet and his wife (center). The model is known as Raymonde. (image credit 6.10)
There was plenty of wine and there were drugs. The public menace represented by drunkenness was well understood and a law of 1873 made its public display a crime, although it was unevenly enforced. On the other hand, where everyone had wine with a meal, abstinence was unknown. “The consumption of alcohol, an accepted sign of virility, helped create an individual’s image,” Michelle Perrot wrote. As for drugs, Richardson wrote that they were, as now, a way of life. Pharmacies sold ether legally for thirty centimes a dram and its excessive use was known to have hastened the death of one of Picasso’s friends, the playwright Alfred Jarry. Another friend, Max Jacob, was “so addicted to this drug that he was obliged to conceal the smell by burning incense in his Bateau Lavoir studio.”
The ruined, barely habitable, but romantic villa on the rue du Delta where Paul Alexandre housed a small colony of artists, as seen in 1913 (image credit 6.11)
Absinthe, the milky opalescent green liquid known as “La Fée Verte,” was, in particular, a drink so favored by the smart set that the cocktail hour became known as “l’heure verte.” Alfred Jarry, whose play Ubu Roi had made him famous but not rich, also indulged. Sacha Guitry wrote, “He inhabited a miserable, dilapidated hut on the edge of the river. You could still read on the walls the words ‘Cleaning and Mending.’ It had an earthen floor, and a bicycle hung from the roof, ‘to stop the rats from eating the tyres,’ explained the seedy-looking writer, a ‘proud little Breton’ with a droopy moustache and long hair which had a greenish tinge acquired from drinking strange concoctions.” Despite its adherents, including Oscar Wilde, who claimed that absinthe led to wonderful visions, the conviction took hold that “it was believed to damage the brain cells and cause epilepsy,” and it was banned in France in 1914.
No such concerns were raised over the fumeries in Montmartre where one smoked opium; Picasso was a regular visitor. Richardson called Alexandre a “Svengali” for introducing Modigliani to hashish. But this was also legal. “Montmartre, at this time, had become infected by the craze for dope, principally hashish,” Charles Douglas wrote in Artist Quarter. “Everyone took the fashionable drug, even the village
lads. Only the apaché element resisted the new temptation. As good businessmen … they realized that if they succumbed it would be bad for trade.”
Marevna, arriving in Paris in 1912, experimented along with everyone else. “We ate the paste in little pellets or mixed it with tobacco and smoked it. The effect on me was usually a desire to laugh, followed by a fit of weeping or chattering about everything I saw (or thought I saw). At first I liked the drug because of the extreme, almost frightening lucidity I gained from it. Then one day I jumped through a window to the roof of the next house, imagining it was just below (it wasn’t). I escaped with only a sore behind.”
Alexandre’s hashish parties began because he knew that the drug, cannabis, extracted from dried hemp, also caused startling visions; he thought that would be marvelous for painters. He had tried it himself. “Late one night, as I walked … all along the Champs-Élysées or the Quai d’Orsay, I could see the gas lamps rise up in tiers like notes of music on an imaginary stave and I began to sing the tune written there. From the Place de la Concorde the rue Gabriel appeared … like a magical vision. The trees, lit from underneath, seemed like the climax of a firework display.”
Modigliani appeared at 7 rue du Delta one day in November, a month after his first appearance in the Salon d’Automne. He had been evicted from the Place Jean-Baptiste Clément and, it would seem, had nowhere to go. A mutual friend, Henri Doucet, brought him to the house to meet Paul Alexandre. Modigliani was accompanied by Maud Abrantes, an elegant, worldly friend who appeared to have transported the entire contents of his studio—clothes, books, and sketchbooks—in her car. Very little is known about her. She was American, married, living in Paris, and cultured, but how they met and their exact relationship is unknown. Modigliani made several studies of her and painted her portrait in grayed-off pastels. Her features, well marked and handsome, are notable for the eyes, which are disproportionately large, and smudged with blotches of paint as if to indicate mute suffering. What is curious about Modigliani’s arrival at the rue du Delta is that, although supposedly homeless, he never took up lodging there and spent that particular night in a hotel on the rue Caulaincourt. Apparently the lady was paying.
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