Meryle Secrest

  The unprepossessing building, left, in a cobbled alley, where Marie Vassilieff ran a café for artists during World War I (image credit 10.7)

  Marevna, who went there regularly, said that Vassilieff was a “tiny, bandy-legged woman, practically a dwarf, with her round, white, browless face, her thin mouth and small teeth.” Everyone else went there as well. Painters, writers, and musicians came to discuss politics, often ending in a fight, to “argue over new art forms, to flirt and to dance to Zadkine’s mad music, ‘The Camel’s Tango.’ ” What began as an act of charity had evolved into an impromptu arts center which Vassilieff, with her penetrating, screechy voice, her commonsense insistence on good food at low prices, her tolerance for artistic exhibitionism, and her willingness to stay open late throughout the war, happily cultivated. Marevna continued, “Modi was a favoured guest at Vassilieva’s canteen, and of course she never charged him anything. Sometimes, when drunk, he would begin undressing under the eager eyes of the faded English and American girls who frequented the canteen. He would stand very erect and undo his girdle [sash] which must have been four or five feet long, then let his trousers slip down to his ankles … then display himself quite naked, slim and white, his torso arched.”

  Being just as much of an exhibitionist as he was, Beà loved disguises and dressing up, or, rather, undressing. So one is inclined to believe, for once, that most unreliable witness to the “scandals” of Modigliani, André Salmon, the man who was even more the helpless pawn of a secret drug habit than his subject, and the writer who adhered to the French conceit that lives should be the starting point for one’s wildest fantasies. In his vie romancée, Modigliani, sa vie et son oeuvre of 1926, Salmon writes that the artist and the poet were about to go to a dinner, or perhaps a Quatz’ Arts ball, or perhaps a party at 21 avenue du Maine, and Beà had nothing to wear. This seems unlikely, but for the moment the reader suspends disbelief. Salmon then asserts that Modigliani, using phrases like, “Let me sort something out,” or “Leave this to me,” or “No prob,” decides to make a dress for her. He begins with one she owns, a dress made of the very finest tussore, a delicate neutral silk. She puts it on and he begins to improvise on his model, shortening the skirt and plunging the neckline. Then, using colored chalks, he appends butterflies, leaves, and garlands of flowers up and down the dress, the skirt, bodice, the breasts, waist, legs, buttocks, thighs, and ankles, melding silk to palpitating flesh in a fine artistic frenzy. The result causes a sensation. Beà, who is obliged to go barefoot as well as half naked because the designer has signed his name to an instep, shivers and smiles bravely. Perhaps it even happened.

  Another account often repeated has Beatrice Hastings dressed up as Madame de Pompadour—or perhaps as Marie Antoinette in shepherdess outfit, carrying a crook. As she goes through the streets doing her morning shopping she carries a basket. It is full, not of flowers, fruit, or food but ducklings, quacking their heads off. Assuming one could get the ducklings in a time of food rationing and then somehow keep them all in a basket while one tripped through the streets in a crinoline, the staging seems hardly worth the momentary effect. What is interesting is that people thought her capable of such a stunt. In her way, Hastings was much of a risk taker as her lover, a factor that would even make scenes from the fertile imagination of a Salmon seem conceivable. This characteristic was a considerable factor in bringing their love affair to its sad and reckless finale.

  It is also clear that Hastings had worn such a costume for some occasion or other, because Madam Pompadour is the title of one of twelve paintings and many drawings that Modigliani executed of her in the years of their relationship. It was shown at the first art exhibition of the Lyre et Palette in 1916. The critic Louis Vauxcelles, for whom Cubism was anathema, wrote, “I look with interest at the new style of Modigliani.”

  The Lyre et Palette was the invention of Émile Lejeune, a well-to-do young Swiss painter who was using a large studio at the end of a courtyard at 6 rue Huyghens in Montparnasse. For whatever reason, the government had closed the theatres and concert halls so Lejeune, responding to need much as Vassilieff had done, looked the situation over. There was plenty of room for a stage and an audience. He was able to rent a hundred chairs from a source in the Luxembourg Gardens, which they picked up and returned with the help of some capacious handcarts once a week. Blackouts, so omnipresent in Britain in World War II, were already being used in Paris. They taped over the single large skylight and used lantern lights to guide the audience through the darkness. Then Lejeune started his series of Saturday-evening concerts with a small group of musicians. That group would become the nucleus for “Les Six”—six composers and a poet—which became enormously successful after World War I: Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Germaine Tailleferre, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, and Cocteau. Musical evenings led to poetry readings with Apollinaire, Cendrars, Jacob, Salmon, and the omnipresent Cocteau. Since there was plenty of wall space there were exhibitions as well and Guillaume set up his collection of primitive sculptures. Going to the Lyre et Palette became so fashionable that the limousines of the wealthy, slumming it from the Right Bank, would jam the narrow streets.

  Madame Pompadour, Modigliani’s portrait of Beatrice Hastings, 1915 (image credit 10.8)

  Moïse Kisling was responsible for introducing him to the Lyre et Palette crowd. He was working on an exhibition with Lejeune, and, when he learned that Modigliani did not have a single canvas available, approached Guillaume. That dealer had the standard arrangement by which Modigliani received a daily stipend, and whatever he produced went straight to his employer’s stockrooms. Kisling persuaded Guillaume to show Madame Pompadour and several other portraits. Being Kisling, he probably transported them himself on a handcart.

  From left, Moïse Kisling and his wife Renée with Conrad Moricand, 1920 (image credit 10.9)

  With his fringe of hair cut, as it seemed, with the aid of a pudding basin, the Polish-born Kisling looked like a choirboy, if one with an impish gleam in his eyes. Born in Cracow of well-to-do parents, Kisling received his art school training in that city and arrived in Montmartre in 1910 when he was just nineteen with a single louis d’or in his pocket. He had a natural gift of gravitating directly to the people who could help him. Within two years he had his first exhibition at the Salon d’Automne and gained a dealer the year after that. How did he do it? The secret, Kisling told Lejeune, was not to wear oneself out on a single painting but to paint several relatively quickly. He would then be able to offer a dealer a group of paintings at an attractive price, so that the dealer could make a tidy profit on each one. This was a relatively easy way of becoming known and building up some goodwill with dealers. Kisling was clever about getting critical attention as well. It was a simple matter of making lots of friends. The critics cost him “at least ten thousand francs a month, not in money but in lavish meals and free trips.” André Salmon, witness at his wedding and godfather to one of his sons, was a very special friend. Kisling could count on a nice review from Salmon whenever he had a show. But Modigliani had no money to spend wooing the critics, even if he had wanted to. So Salmon, as Czechowska said, did not waste his time looking at Modigliani’s paintings and rarely committed a word to print—at least during Modigliani’s lifetime.

  One of a series of photographs taken by Jean Cocteau one summer day in 1916 when a group gathered for lunch. They included Modigliani and Picasso, flanked by a hatted André Salmon. (image credit 10.10)

  At the outbreak of war Kisling joined the Foreign Legion. He was wounded, honorably discharged, and received French citizenship in recognition of his services. His family had helped support him and Kisling, who followed his own precepts to the letter, worked on four or five paintings at once and was soon well off. A young American friend of his, Victor Chapman-Chandler, an architecture student turned fighter pilot, died in an air battle in 1916, leaving Kisling a small fortune: five thousand francs. Claude de Voort, his biographer, noted that the artist had been b
orn under a very lucky star. Kisling was soon ensconced in a comfortable apartment on the rue Joseph Bara, around the corner from the boulevard du Montparnasse. In years to come he would employ five servants and own two American cars.

  There was something direct and uncomplicated about Kisling that communicated itself in his art. Work our age now finds shallow and sentimental accorded perfectly with popular tastes, although sophisticates like René Gimpel thought Kisling was a very bad painter. Kisling liked bright and glowing flowers, luscious bowls of fruit, pleasing still lifes, dramatic nudes with high breasts, shining eyes, and short black hair, and his portraits were freshly considered and generous. This marked his character. He was always ready for un petit verre, a dinner, a party, or a costume ball, and his door was always open. It was another rue du Delta with another benevolent patron. He became, someone said, “[t]he axis around which everything turned in Montparnasse life.” In old age he asked himself, “How was I able to come home more or less drunk every morning at seven and be up at nine when the model arrived? I washed myself and started to work … It was like that every day: mornings of work, afternoons constantly interrupted by innumerable visitors and evenings of running around that lasted at least until dawn.”

  A bigger income only meant an excuse for bigger and better parties. Kisling’s Wednesday lunches, washed down with plenty of Armagnac, went on into the evening. One never knew whom one might find there: writers, actors, lawyers, politicians, scientists, musicians, architects, and, of course, artists. He once said, “I want life to be beautiful and for desirable women to have their desires and their lives to be colorful.” Given his eye for pretty women it is odd that Kisling married a strikingly plain girl. She was Renée Gros, the Catholic daughter of a French military officer, and he seems to have chosen her almost against his will. “Merde!” he told his friends at the Rotonde. “I’m marrying the daughter of an officer.” She was slim and strong, a forceful personality with a nose that dominated her narrow face. She also had an innate sense of style that took her into the category of “jolie laide.” Her hair was cut exactly like her husband’s—it was called the coupe garçonne at the time—she wore matching checked American cowboy shirts with overalls, she was an even more ferocious party giver than he was, and she could, it was said, blacken the eye of anyone who had the temerity to leave early. They were seen together everywhere. They were unforgettable.

  Their wedding has been told and retold, with ever more embellishments; the best witness, as might be expected, turns out to be the bridegroom himself. The event, Kisling said, got off to a perfectly respectable start with a ceremony in the town hall of the cinquième. In honor of the occasion he wore his Sunday best, that is to say, he put a jacket over his overalls; Renée wore her usual charwoman’s outfit. André Salmon was the witness and Max Jacob was equally resplendent as a satanic Pierrot. About a dozen of them lunched at Leduc’s on the boulevard Raspail and then repaired to the Rotonde for some serious drinking.

  Pretty soon the word got out that the Kislings had just got married and all the drinks were on the house. They arrived in great waves: the small and fat, tall and short, friends, strangers, clochards—the place was seething and all drinking, as they thought, on Kisling’s dime. Something had to be done fast. Kisling and friends rounded up about twenty fiacres, the oldest they could find, complete with decrepit horses, and made their escape just as the bill arrived. Their grandiose aim was to visit every whorehouse in Paris. It was doomed to fail, but they had fun trying in the rue Saint-Apolline, the rue de l’Échaudé, the rue Mazarine, and the Quartier Saint-Sulpice. The procedure was always the same: peremptory knocks on the door, startled owners, calls for champagne all round, friendly chats with ladies of the night, and abrupt departures nicely timed to avoid the inevitable moment of reckoning.

  Finally the motley band arrived at 3 rue Joseph Bara eight flights up (seventh floor in France). The happy hordes, believing a vast banquet awaited them, made the climb and packed the rooms to the rafters. Kisling mentioned in passing that there were a few friendly scuffles and some knives came out before being sheathed in the general spirit of goodwill. Kind friends went looking for reinforcements: red wine, Calvados, Benedictine, or anything. Pretty soon no one noticed that there was not going to be any food. In fact, all went well until Kisling came upon a young man in a corner who had found a cardboard box full of all his drawings and was industriously tearing them up into tiny pieces and looking fondly at the growing piles of paper. With the help of a huge Norwegian, the offender was hurled unceremoniously down the stairs. Kisling found out later he had been taken to the hospital but unfortunately survived. What with the smoking and the alcoholic haze, Kisling began to forget things after awhile and apparently did not remember that, at some point, Jacob stood up and started on his famous impersonations that made everybody laugh. Modigliani kept interrupting. Couldn’t he play Dante? He knew just how to do it. Please, couldn’t he play Dante? The crowd told him to shut up.

  Once the name of Shakespeare was mentioned Modigliani was not to be stopped. He must play Hamlet’s ghost. “He rushed to the small room adjoining the studio, the ‘bridal suite.’ He came out again swathed in classic sartorial fashion in a white sheet. At the door he started playing the part of the ghost of Hamlet’s father: ‘God or man, which art thou?’—with such panache that Max Jacob, at times an outstanding actor, at once ceased his impressions,” Salmon recalled.

  Now Modigliani was free to shout, now he alone dominated the stage … Straight away our Amedeo instinctively found the right words. At first they seemed meaningless, but by pronouncing or screaming them in his own unique way he made them serve his purpose, namely to communicate to the spectators that a dead being can continue to plague the living from beyond the grave … And so suddenly he began yelling—I don’t think you hear this call nowadays but at the time you heard it every day in the streets in Paris—“Barrels, barrels, have you any barrels?”

  The accursed ghost, condemned for all eternity to roll before him his cask full of hideous memories, full of sin, full of pangs of conscience and tears! The brand-new Madame Kisling, née Renée-Jean, broke this awe-inspiring spell with the pained scream of a young bride and dutiful housewife: “My bridal linen!”

  Her husband, quite nude, was scooped out of the gutter on the boulevard du Montparnasse four days later, and the party was finally over.

  As the Siege of Paris wore on in November 1914 Modigliani and his new love settled into a routine of comfortable domesticity. On All Saints Day, the cemetery of Montparnasse being just around the corner, they went to pay their respects to the fallen. Their housekeeper had been to the market at five a.m. to buy a wreath, and the boulevard du Montparnasse was packed with flower stalls and so many crowds that one was, Hastings wrote, almost carried along. Once in the cemetery one found small groups huddled around new graves, sobbing. And there was something worse: a woman lying flat on a grave. It seemed her husband had been killed in August and she was going to lie there until she died with him. Every evening, she had to be forcibly ejected. It was all too sad; Hastings left as soon as she could.

  Now they were back indoors, drinking tea, watching the flames flicker in the stove and listening to the rain on the roof; it was just like being in London. They read the papers to each other, singling out the sections about corpses, both German and French, rotting in the trenches, and agreed once more about the folly of the war. At least the British working classes had stopped joining up with anything like zeal, having begun to learn the truth about the capitalists’ war. What was needed were a few Zeppelins over London to bring the plutocrats to their senses. The same issue contained a satirical verse that she wrote under one of her noms de plume, Cyril S. Davis. It was called “The British Profiteer,” and sung to the tune of “The British Grenadier”:

  Some talk of Shaw and Masefield, and some of Begbie, too,

  But what of dear old Rothschild? was Briton e’er more true?

  For all the world’s great
martyrs, there’s none whom we revere,

  With a cent. per cent., per cent., per cent.,

  Like a British Profiteer.

  Warmed by such thoughts they went for a walk to the Porte d’Orléans on the edge of the city, “where the trees and the barbed wire and the sharp iron points still lie about that were to arrest the onslaught of the German cavalry.” Then they indulged in their favorite pastime, hunting for books up and down the bouquinistes along the Seine. There were wonderful cheap editions one could buy for a half penny, or five centimes, of the French memoirists, “Mesdames” de Staël, de la Fayette, des Ursins, Roland, Depinay, de Caylus, de Maintenon, and de Genlis. They would immerse themselves in the past for the duration.

  Modigliani had begun to work on preparatory sketches that would result in portrait after portrait of his amour, the most he would execute of any woman except one. Alice Morning, having written her latest column, went for a walk in the rain, got soaked, and was now “half delirious” with influenza. Fortunately, “somebody” had made a very pretty drawing of her. “I look like the best type of Virgin Mary, without any worldly accessories, as it were. But what do I care about it now—my career is nothing but a sneeze.” One assumes dozens were finished before Modigliani felt confident enough to commit his ideas to paint. He painted himself as Pierrot during his relationship with Hastings. Complete with black cap and ruffle, one eye socket, the left, was blank, and the other eye looked outward. A year later, 1916, either he or Beà had the notion of painting a companion portrait of her. The portrait is never described as such, but it is so much of a mirror image that the possibility is intriguing. Pierrot’s pose, in three-quarter face, is turned to the left of the viewer; in the 1916 portrait of Beà, the pose is to the right. Her features are more delicately drawn but otherwise identical; here are the same highly marked eyebrows, the same upturned nose, the same position of the mouth, the same jawline, and the same neck, turned at the same angle. There are some minor differences; the treatment of the eyes is more conventional and the lips are parted. The color schemes are complementary, and the general effect suggests that the two were meant to be hung together, so that each is looking in the direction of the other, in the middle of a conversation.