Meryle Secrest

by Modigliani: A Life

  Given the notorious unreliability of reported speech it seems possible, just the same, that any appeal to Emanuele for more money would not have been well received, since he and Umberto had been helping to support Dedo for years. There seemed to be precious little to show for the economic sacrifices they were all making. Any sensible artist/sculptor would have found some part-time work, if only out of desperation. Emanuele took matters into his own hands, Douglas continues. He found his brother employment as a sculptor, working on marble in Carrara, all expenses paid. Dedo still refused to take the hint. It is not surprising that Emanuele did not bother to find out what was remarkable about his brother’s art—if anything.

  That summer Dedo was spending his days at the atelier of his friend Gino Romiti, writing philosophical articles with his aunt Laure, and painting, although just how many canvases he produced is unknown. He wrote to Paul Alexandre early in September: “I sent you a card from Pisa where I spent a divine day. I want to see Siena before leaving. Received a card today from Le Fauconnier. He wrote four absolutely extraordinary lines of nonsense about Brancusi which pleased me enormously.” He wanted registration forms for the Salon d’Automne and told his “very dear Paul” where to get them. He tried to appear offhand: “To exhibit or not to exhibit, deep down it’s all the same.” Nevertheless he wanted news of the Salon. He was in high spirits and secretly thrilled to be returning to Paris soon. Paul would find him restored, he wrote, not just physically, but sartorially as well—underlined.

  There is reason to think that while in Livorno Modigliani was also sculpting. Gastone Razzaguta, who believed he met Modigliani in about 1912 or 1913, recalled that the latter passed around photographs of his sculptures. He was evidently proud of them and expected compliments but, “we didn’t understand them at all.” When Modigliani told Razzaguta he needed a large room where he could go on sculpting, “we thought it was just another of his crazy ideas.” But Modigliani kept asking and finally a room was found. His friends even obliged by carrying in some blocks of raw material, actually paving stones.

  “Dedo, who was like a ghost with us, who appeared and disappeared, from the day he got that big room and the stones … we didn’t see him again for some time. What he was doing with those stones we never knew. But he must have been doing something because when he decided to return to Paris, he asked us where he could store the sculptures.” Razzaguta claimed that Modigliani’s friends never saw the results, but Bruno Miniata said that he had indeed shown his work around.

  Dedo had arrived late at the Caffè Bardi where we used to meet. It was hot—summertime. We left and were walking along beside the Fosso Reale (Royal Moat) toward the Dutch church. At some point Dedo pulled a stone head with a long nose from its newspaper wrapping. He showed it to us as if he was showing us a masterpiece and waiting to hear our opinions.

  I don’t remember exactly who it was—Romiti, Lloyd, Benvenuti, Natali, Martinelli or even Vinzio Sommati. There were a number of us—the usual crowd. Everyone burst out laughing. They were teasing poor Dedo about that head. Without a word Dedo threw it over his shoulder into the water below.

  It could have been a single head or two or three. Some said that Modigliani had piled a wheelbarrow full of sculptures, pushed them down the via Gherardi del Testa, and dumped the whole thing in the canal. The accounts varied, but the point of the story was how ridiculous the work was and how its creator had been shamed into destroying it.

  One art historian, Vera Durbè, curator of the Museo Progressivo d’Arte Contemporanea in Livorno, believed that the story was true. In 1984 the city fathers were marking the centenary of Modigliani’s birth with exhibits, conferences, and seminars. Why not seize the opportunity to dredge the Fosso Reale? What a coup it would be if three unknown sculptures could be found. The council agreed and work began.

  To everyone’s astonishment, a battered wheelbarrow and three sculptures emerged from the murky water. They were in stone. They had the eyes, the elongated noses, and the enigmatic expressions of Modigliani’s mature style. They were suitably blackened by mud and blotched with rust, apparent proof of decades of immersion. They had to be real. Vera Durbè wept when she saw them. Numerous prominent art historians rushed into print. The sculptures were “treasures,” “magical faces,” “splendid primitive heads,” no less than “a resurrection.”

  A preparatory sketch for The Cellist, 1910 (image credit 7.3)

  So much for expert opinion. In a few weeks three young pranksters: a medical student, a business student, and an aspiring engineer said they had built the fakes themselves using hammers, chisels, a screwdriver, and a Black and Decker electric drill. They described how they had “aged” the fakes. The critics, their reputations at stake, demanded proof. The forgers, on television, reconstructed new masterpieces in about four hours. Vera Durbè collapsed and was hospitalized. Everyone else had a good laugh. Black and Decker subsequently ran some sly commercials juxtaposing the drawing of an abstract head with the comment, “It’s easy to be talented with a Black and Decker.”

  Whether Modigliani was really a sculptor who painted, or a painter who experimented in sculpture will never be settled. What is clear is that, even at the height of his absorption with sculpture he was still painting. Late in 1909 he completed a canvas which caused a genuine stir when it was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910. Some powerful preparatory sketches of a seated cellist in Chinese ink and black crayon have survived in the Alexandre collection. The unknown sitter—believed to have been renting a room next door to Modigliani’s in the Cité Falguière—is young, bearded, and completely absorbed in his task. The sketches show that the composition was diagonal from an early stage, the details simplified to their essences, an idea which continues to the finished work, which Modigliani painted in two slightly different versions. The artist’s focus is on the communion of artist with his instrument and the background: the addition of a fireplace, mirror, wallpaper, and bed, is subordinate. Jeanne Modigliani called it “one of the most complex and significant works of a period in which all his contradictory tendencies met. The contrast and balance between the cool harmonies of green, blue and gray-white and the warm browns, reds and ochres; the composed lines of the face and the interminable curve of the arm; these all balance the volumetric density of the cello.” The influence of Cézanne is clear enough, but as Werner Schmalenbach observed, it is an influence more transmuted than direct and already on the wane.

  Along with The Cellist Modigliani exhibited five other paintings at that exhibition: the Beggar of Leghorn, Lunair, two studies, and Beggar Woman, the painting he had given to Jean Alexandre. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire singled him out in a column for L’Intransigeant and André Salmon did the same in Paris Journal. Two people had seen fit to distinguish him from the pack—there had been six thousand entries. He was on his way. Or was he? If Modigliani had hoped to find a dealer he was disappointed; nothing sold. Paul Alexandre was still his only patron.

  Modigliani continued to create new heads. Roberto Rossi had a studio opposite his in the Cité Falguière for a time and remembered the terrible heat of the summer of 1911, when it was too hot to do anything but they hammered away anyway. Each day he would find Modigliani outside on a small embankment, at the same task. As the days wore on the resulting heads became increasingly abstract until the Modigliani nose, simplified to a triangle and longer by the hour, was almost all that was left.

  Each day Rossi would say teasingly, “Amedeo, don’t forget about the nose!” and Modigliani would refuse to laugh. After Rossi moved to the boulevard Quinet in the fourteenth arrondissement they would meet over a glass of wine at a small café in front of the Cimetière du Montparnasse and Modigliani would invariably ask for a loan. At one time, Rossi said, he was owed a considerable amount of money, but was good-naturedly in no rush to call in the debt.

  “One day he knocked at my door with a roll of drawings under his arm. He wanted me to accept them in payment of his debts … and, to overc
ome my resistance, threw the roll on my desk. I gave them back to him, assuring him he did not owe me anything. He would not listen. Once again he threw the roll on the desk and headed for the door.” It was clear that the payment was far in excess of the money owed. He adroitly threw the roll at Modigliani’s feet. Modigliani conceded defeat and retrieved it, “muttering his usual ‘Porca Madonna,’ ” Rossi concluded. “And that’s why I don’t have a single memento of my friend.”

  Rossi recalled another occasion when he and a woman friend went to see an exhibition of paintings by Baron Antoine-Jean Gros at a fashionable gallery on the rue La Boétie, where the entrance was being guarded by “a costumed servant with a half-moon face.” They happened to appear just as Modigliani was about to go in. Rossi and his friend were respectably dressed; the artist was in a wrinkled shirt with no tie. The servant held up his hand, as if prepared to eject him by force. “Porca Madonna … Se lo vada a pigliare in culo!” Modigliani swore, and left. Whether or not the servant understood the insult is not recorded.

  In the spring of 1910 an unknown poet, aged twenty-one, arrived in Paris for her honeymoon. She had been born Anna Gorenko, daughter of a naval engineer, and began writing poetry at a young age. When her father objected, she took the name of a medieval Tatar prince, Akmat, a descendant of Genghis Khan, whom she claimed as one of her ancestors, becoming Anna Akhmatova. This self-invention could have been one of the factors that attracted her to Modigliani when she, wife of a prominent older poet, Nicolay Gumilyov, not yet famous herself, made her first trip to Europe.

  Anna Akhmatova, 1910 (image credit 7.4)

  Her reputation as “a legendary beauty of Bohemian prerevolutionary St. Petersburg” was deserved, to a point. Luminous gray eyes, an expressive mouth, and wide cheekbones guaranteed that she would be a beauty, except for one feature: an emphatic nose with a pronounced bump. The result was unexpected and somewhat unsettling, as if some stigmata had marked her for a prominent and menacing fate. Proudly, almost defiantly, she sat for portrait after portrait, none of which glossed over the truth of that singular nose. She lived through the turbulent unfolding of the Russian destiny: the revolutions, wars, tyrannies, and Stalinist firing squads. Her husband was shot on a trumped-up charge, her son endured years in labor camps, and she herself somehow survived the Siege of Leningrad. Under these terrible pressures, in the face of agony and loss, she wrote haunting poems that have assured her a lasting fame. After Leningrad, she wrote,

  That was when the ones who smiled

  Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

  And like a useless appendage, Leningrad

  Swung from its prisons.

  She was tall, slender, and quiet, a woman of education and artless self-assurance, whose feelings were kept in check by an almost superhuman self-control. Her themes were love, loss, and helpless endurance; like haiku poetry, her verses give sudden glimpses into an abyss of pain. Such superb economy of means, along with a natural elegance of manner, marked her as someone quite apart, and Modigliani would have instantly recognized a kindred spirit. How they met is not recorded in a memoir that is charmingly direct and typically reticent.

  What Modigliani might have found fascinating about her, she wrote, was a certain ability to “read other people’s thoughts, to dream other people’s dreams … He repeatedly said to me: ‘On communique.’ [We understand each other.] And often, ‘Il n’y a que vous pour réaliser cela.’ [Only you can manage that.]” He also said matter-of-factly, “J’ai oublié de vous dire que je suis Juif.” [I forgot to tell you I’m Jewish.]

  For her part, she continued, it is likely “that neither of us understood one essential thing: that everything that was happening was the pre-history of both our lives: his—very short, mine—very long. The breath of art had not yet charred, not yet transformed our two existences; this should have been the light, bright hour that precedes the dawn. But the future, which as we know casts its shadow long before it appears, knocked at the window, hid behind lampposts, cut through our dreams, and threatened with the terrible Baudelairian Paris concealed somewhere nearby. And all that was divine in Modigliani only sparkled through a sort of gloom.”

  Curiously, she too thought he had the head of Antinous, “and in his eyes was a golden gleam.” He was, she concluded, “unlike anyone in the world. I shall never forget his voice.” She was on her honeymoon, but her husband was involved in lectures and conferences, and Modigliani was an eager presence. A year later, in the summer of 1911, she returned and they saw each other constantly.

  And fame came sailing, like a swan

  From golden haze unveiled,

  While you, love, augured all along

  Despair, and never failed.

  —“TO MY VERSES” (1910)

  To her, he seemed very lonely. There was no girl in his life just then, and he seemed to know almost no one, even in the Quartier Latin, where everyone more or less knew everyone else. He had the most perfectly exquisite manners. Published in the 1960s, just before her death, her memoir was, in part, an indignant defense against the prevailing view of Modigliani; she never saw him drunk, she wrote firmly. What she could not understand was how he had survived. Although the child of middle-class parents, she knew something about poverty, the vaporous atmosphere of the slums, as an English teacher, Alexander Paterson, described them in 1911. “It is the constant reminder of poverty and grinding life, of shut windows and small inadequate washing basins, of last week’s rain,” and the soft, relentless shower of dirt, “which falls and creeps and covers and chokes.” When they met for the second time, he had endured a harsh winter. He was thinner and his mood was somber.

  They used to meet in the Jardins du Luxembourg. Renting a chair cost a pittance but it was more than he could afford, so they shared a bench. They sat in the warm summer rain under his enormous, battered black umbrella and recited Verlaine to each other, thrilled to discover that they both knew the same passages. She did not know then that Modigliani also wrote poetry, but he read hers; he confessed charmingly that he did not understand them but was sure they were very fine. Passersby pointed out the particular path in the gardens that Verlaine, followed by a crowd of admirers, habitually took. He was on his way to a café where he wrote his poems and ate lunch. He was no longer walking that path (he died in 1896), but another great man was, wearing a beautifully tailored overcoat and with the red ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur in his lapel: Henri de Regnier. Modigliani loved Laforge, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire and would recite them by the hour, although not Dante, she thought out of consideration for her, since she knew no Italian. He also recited Les Chants de Maldoror, the then-obscure work by the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont.

  A period view of the Luxembourg Gardens, where Modigliani and Akhmatova met to recite poetry to each other. From an old postcard (image credit 7.5)

  He took her to the place where he worked, “the little courtyard behind his studio; you could hear the knock of his mallet in the deserted alley.” When his sculptures went on view at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911 he asked her to go. So she went and found him there, but he did not approach her, she thought because she was with a group of friends. The walls of his studio were lined with “incredibly tall portraits” that seemed to stretch from floor to ceiling and which she never saw again. He was full of enthusiasms, except for whatever was in vogue at the moment. This included Cubism, which was “all-conquering but alien to Modigliani.” He took her on a tour of the Department of Egyptian Antiquities at the Louvre; nothing else, he said grandly, was worth her attention. Then he made a drawing of her dressed as an Egyptian queen; he was passionately interested in all things Egyptian.

  He drew her repeatedly. At one time she owned sixteen of his drawings; Modigliani told her to frame them and hang them around the rooms of her house in Tsarskoye Selo. They were lost when the house was ransacked during the Russian Revolution. Others have survived, showing that she posed for him in the nude, drawings which hint at her almost divine status in
his eyes. The winter she was in Russia he wrote her long and beautiful letters. He said, “You are for me like a haunting memory.” He said he would like to hold her head in his hands and cover her with his love.

  She would never have revealed her feelings in so many words but she did it in other ways. She knew that in the dead of night he would prowl the streets for hours. Sometimes he took her with him, on nights of the full moon, for instance, when they would walk behind the Pantheon and explore the old Paris. She also knew that he sometimes walked under her windows; she would recognize his step and watch his shadow lingering across the glass. One day she arrived when he was out, carrying a bouquet of roses. When he did not come to the door she threw them, one by one, through an open window. They fell on the floor so artistically he was convinced she must have arranged them herself.

  Akhmatova arrived in mid-May of 1911 and returned to Russia two months later, perhaps by the end of July. At that point Modigliani’s aunt Laure appears in his life in a curious way. That was the summer that Apollinaire, working in a bank, sold a few pictures for him. This may have led Modigliani to mention something to Laure about making a visit to the French countryside. Whether this happened as Akhmatova was leaving, or just after she left, the sequence of events is intriguing. According to Jeanne Modigliani, Laure Garsin found a small house for rent at Yport, a village in the Seine-Inférieure not far from the coast, and invited Modigliani there for a rest cure. He arrived in early September, in an open carriage through which he had driven in heavy rain. Naturally, he was soaking wet. But instead of resting in the cottage he insisted on making a trip to Fécamp to see the beaches. And it was still raining.