Meryle Secrest

  The elongated neck, the frequent lack of a collar, and the use of a V-neckline for emphasis is invariably seen in Modigliani’s portraits of women. It is so characteristic that it led to a quip: Modigliani got his “ ‘swan-neck’ inspiration from glimpsing his mistress through the neck of an absinthe bottle,” Charles Douglas joked in Artist Quarter. With the exception of the earliest studies there is hardly one that does not show this determined trait. Even his sculptures do not exhibit the exaggeration that begins to crop up in his caryatid drawings arriving in his experimental portrait of a woman, 1911, whose head is balanced on a column of such formidable length that it looks like an afterthought. No doubt the evolution of the sculptural impulse accounts for this development. Still, it is intriguing to think that the Romantic tradition of the consumptive had something to do with it, if only because it had persisted for a century. There are other hints: eyes that appear to be weeping, as in his portrait of Maud Abrantes and “La Petite Louise,” and expressions that are gaunt, emaciated, even tragic. The many portraits of Lunia Czechowska and Hanka Zborowska, in particular, exemplify the long-limbed, languorous, unsmiling, secretly suffering tradition of the heroine marked for death.

  If African sculptures were the only models one would expect to find this trait repeated in Modigliani’s superb paintings of nudes, where it never appears, or his portraits of children. One would also expect to see it in Modigliani’s portraits of men. There are exceptions, but in the main his male subjects are buttoned to the ears with collars, ties, jackets, scarves, and turtlenecks. This, curiously, points to another historical fact: men suffering from consumption notoriously concealed their necks. “A … Parisian critic, Véron, director of the Opéra … was known to be severely afflicted with scrofula; he always wore a high stock to dissimulate the blemishes caused by the tuberculous glands” in his neck. Modigliani frequently wore neckerchiefs and scarves, and his final self-portrait, executed a few months before his death, shows him similarly bundled up. The French for a man’s scarf, cache-col, means “hide the neck.”

  Ideals about feminine beauty that owed their origins to the physical signs of a grave illness, however much they might resonate with Modigliani emotionally and call forth sympathetic reverberations in his work, can only partly explain the paradox of his last great period. The more he paints individuals the more their particular features fade into the background, and the more faces seem encased in a smooth shell as hard as a carapace. As Pierre Daix observed, the comparison between Picasso’s revised portrait of Gertrude Stein and Modigliani’s mature style is apt. Modigliani, however, never took his experiment with features further than that. Unlike Picasso, who has already turned his women’s faces into beak-like appendages by the time he is working on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Modigliani’s noses stay where they were put, the mouths fall beneath them, there are no double profiles or eyes placed in the middle of foreheads. Picasso’s interest is schematic, to see how far he can rearrange facial features and still have them be recognizable. Modigliani’s interest is otherwise. He is trying to simplify and reduce to the irreducible minimum the essence of a personality without actually losing it altogether. The masks of the commedia dell’arte wore, as Pierre Louis wrote in The Italian Comedy, “an indefinable expression as full of possibilities as of impossibilities, like the Mona Lisa, which every generation interprets differently.” Modigliani’s self-imposed challenge, to see how far he could venture into abstraction without ending in either anonymity or caricature, must be one of the most difficult any artist since the Renaissance has attempted.

  Werner Schmalenbach, who has written extensively about Modigliani’s work, observed, “It is possible … to ask whether Modigliani was deeply interested in his sitters at all. His commentators answer the question in the affirmative, but this is probably the result of conventional expectations, because the paintings themselves do very little to confirm it. How little he says about, say, his friend Max Jacob. How little about the essence of his mistress Beatrice Hastings. However skilfully he characterizes those whom he paints, how little he penetrates into them. The depiction always remains very much distanced.” As if they were wearing masks.

  One can only guess at the reasons why the theme of the mask, in sculpture and painting, had such an enduring hold on Modigliani’s imagination. One can perhaps suggest that the family’s original and calamitous social demotion, stemming from Flaminio’s reckless gamble, the long struggle to survive, the disaster and social disgrace of Mené’s imprisonment, and the incidence, in the Garsin family, of madness and suicide, would be reason enough for most families to hide their secrets. Eugénie presented the quintessential response of a socially prominent woman who finds herself in such straits: she pretended that nothing had happened. She lifted her chin, went out in public in her best clothes, taught the children of prominent families, she continued her intellectual studies, she maintained a façade of her marriage: in short, she behaved with perfect decorum. All this, despite the pity and condescension, as Emanuele described it in his letter to Dedo, with which she was being judged. In other words, she wore a mask.

  Dedo, that most impressionable of her children, followed the pattern. He affected the same grand manner, fooling everyone he met when he first arrived in Paris by his clothes, his lifestyle, his erudition, and his apparent ability to spend without limit. Such careless generosity continued even once he was in debt. Ludwig Meidner, who met him in 1906, recalled an “immaculately dressed … lively, good-looking young man of twenty-two” who, after some months in Paris, was “in the direst of financial straits.” But, “although I was not badly off at this time Modi never addressed such requests to me—I don’t know why.” Meidner put it down to pride, and one could posit that, as a member of a once-wealthy and socially prominent family, that pride was wrapped up in protecting a secret that could not be told. The humiliation would be too much to bear. As had been true since Greek and Roman times, you donned a mask to hide the truth. But you also became Harlequin himself. “For the masks were not mere disguises of the face, but the full expression of a character itself,” Pierre Louis Duchartre added. “And it is the soul, in the Latin sense of animus, which stamps the features as surely as the thumb models the lump of clay.” And so Modigliani “played the mask.” He was “our prince,” his friends said kindly, although they knew otherwise. And he grandly threw out, or threw away, pearls of his imagination as if they were small change.

  Such secrets had to be kept because, as Michelle Perrot writes in A History of Private Life, defending one’s family honor was essential.

  Secrecy [was] the mortar that held the family together and created a fortress against the outside world. But that very mortar had been known to create cracks and crevices in its structure. Cries and whispers, creaking doors, locked drawers, purloined letters, glimpsed gestures, confidences and mysteries, sidelong and intercepted glances, words spoken and unspoken—all these created a universe of internal communications, and the more varied the interests, loves, hatreds, and shameful feelings of individual family members, the more subtle those communications were. The family was an endless source of drama. Novelists drew on it constantly, and fragments of the rich saga of private life occasionally could be read in the newspapers.

  Louis Chevalier wrote, “Not every family is a tragic affair, but every tragedy is a family affair.”

  During the seven years following Modigliani’s arrival in Paris in 1906, according to Ambrogio Ceroni’s authoritative I dipinti di Modigliani (1970), he completed about 400 paintings. After turning away from sculpture in 1914, Modigliani began to paint at an accelerating rate. There were seven paintings that year, according to the same source. In 1915 that figure jumped to fifty-three, on average a painting a week. In 1916, he exceeded that total, completing fifty-eight works, including six nudes. In 1917, there were another fifty-eight paintings, including twenty nudes. In 1918, there were sixty-six, six of them nudes. In 1919, the final year of his life, when he became seriously ill, he still
managed to execute fifty-four paintings. This is a conservative estimate; the Ceroni list is known to be incomplete and some scholars put the total at between 425–450 works, small by the standards of a Renoir but still large when one considers that only six years of work remained to him.

  Part of the reason why Modigliani was able to continue his rapid rate, even after he became very ill, has to be credited to the constant drawing which took hours of his time every day. Like a great athlete or virtuoso violinist, he was constantly limbering up his fingers so that they would be instantly obedient to the demands of his imagination. The fact that he fell short of his own goals often enough accounts for the exasperation with which he would abandon attempt after attempt. He was, as Max Jacob observed, in search of the perfect line, “a need for crystalline purity, a trueness to himself in life as in art.”

  In painting after painting Modigliani sought the chimera of the ideal, a form that summed up and personified the secret essence of life itself, a goal he knew he would never achieve. But in an age that was abandoning the idea of line altogether, “his drawing developed from the stylized yet energetic lines of the early caryatids to … exquisitely sensitive and marvelously succinct lines … from a line like a sewn chainstitch, cautious and even, to the swinging rhythms of his last years,” Agnes Mongan wrote. Modigliani makes it look so simple, effortless even, which has deceived many a would-be forger. Such artlessness testifies to an acute and rarefied mastery of form.

  Modigliani’s passionate love of sculpture makes the line between the work he abandoned and subsequent paintings and drawings very clear. The caryatids, for instance, which Frederick S. Wight says have the same significance for Modigliani as his reclining figures had for Henry Moore, were a stylistic influence, with their “clearcut sculptural contours.” Wight wrote, “the figures are in effect colored sculpture, and the background is a niche that wraps them around.” The emphasis on the female form finds its counterparts in the nudes, and also the subsequent portraits, most of which are of women, single figures posed indoors with dramatically simplified backgrounds. “Cézanne’s whittling of form with little revolving planes was to give incision to Modigliani’s painting, and to work out a coexistence with the linked ovals which he learned from the sculptor Brancusi.”

  Within his self-imposed limits Modigliani continued to experiment and refine his vision. One of his most interesting experiments was begun with the two portraits he executed of Frank Burty Haviland at the outbreak of World War I. This bravura display of a pointillist technique married dots of softly graded blues and indigos with burnt siennas, rusts, and crimsons. The dappled effect sets off the sitter’s aquiline features. But Modigliani must have found the resulting portrait too static, a problem he brilliantly resolved in his whirling portraits of Diego Rivera.

  Modigliani often left works unfinished, even in paintings as fully executed as Gypsy Woman with Baby, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, whose infant’s foot is only outlined. In his 1915 portrait of Henri Laurens, the artist’s predilection for leaving large areas untouched is on display. The seated sitter, bearded and wearing a prominent tie, is missing an eye, a leg, a hand, and most of the background. The portrait is executed in soft greenish and blueish grays, with emphatic touches of dark brown and gray. The shoulders are distorted and the paint is handled like watercolor. Even so, the result is curiously satisfying, as the artist must have realized. It has a unity of vision all its own, and Modigliani was superstitious about spoiling any study that seemed to have reached a certain stage of completion, even if only fragmentary. As with any drawing, he was immediately ready to abandon the idea and begin again. On the other hand, if he felt the effect was complete except for a certain something, he might, for instance, as in the 1916 portrait of Soutine, add a lock of hair out of place. Or there might be a point of red beside the bridge of the nose, or a mannered rise to the eyebrow that chance alone cannot account for.

  An example of this is the solidly completed portrait of Max Jacob with top hat that Modigliani painted in 1916. As Werner Schmalenbach points out, the sculptural influence on the work is almost palpable, from the jaunty angle of the heavy black hat, the stiffly thrusting tie, and the nose, “which looks as if hewn from a plank with an axe.” The blocklike stone backgrounds of gray and dark brown, the opaque brown of the jacket, even the diagonal shadows from forehead to eye and cheekbone to chin seem hewn from rock rather than palpitating flesh. As for the eyes, neither has a pupil. One is an indeterminate gray and the other has been inexplicably cross-hatched, one of those tiny details that cannot be accidental. What can this mean? Painting eyes shut, Schmalenbach points out, was not unique to Modigliani, since this kind of detail shows up in Matisse and Picasso and is, furthermore, a feature of the African masks that influenced them all. Survage liked to quote Modigliani, who might paint one eye looking out and another as a blank, to the effect that, “With one eye you look outside, with the other, you look inside.” This does not solve the problem of the cross-hatching in the Jacob painting. Could there be some implied reference to Jacob’s interests in poetry and alchemy, those of a man seeing life through the prism of other worlds?

  Modigliani’s paintings of weight and density alternate with other studies in which the concept is full of delicacy and nuance. There is for instance the portrait of Beatrice Hastings in 1916, already described, that could be a companion portrait to his Pierrot. This study in soft blue-grays and browns has a feeling of spontaneity—she said she often walked around ignoring him while he was painting her—that is in contrast to his more studiously realized works, such as The Cellist of 1909. Compared with Madam Pompadour it is almost a sketch. Yet Modigliani sometimes achieved superior results with this particular approach, which gains in swiftness and subtlety whatever is lost in monumentality. There are portraits of Moïse Kisling, painted in 1916, with his youthful fringe of hair and irresistibly almond eyes that perfectly mirror his freewheeling personality. There is Zborowski, another friend he would paint repeatedly, in one case with arms folded, his strongly Slavic and rhythmical features delicately distorted by a pastel blotch of green at the corner of one eye.

  Then there is Louise, whom he also painted more than once, in one case with head tilted and a shifting kaleidoscope of color patterns crossing her small face. She seems more child than woman, and Modigliani’s emotional restraint is particularly evident in his many portraits of children. Another masterpiece is a lifesize portrait of a girl, perhaps aged eight or ten, in a nocturne of soft blues, looking at the viewer with shy directness. Schmalenbach wrote that the painter’s delicate understanding of these subjects is all the more intense “because nothing is mannered.”

  Given Modigliani’s perpetual poverty it is odd that he never seemed to look for sitters prepared to pay, cultivating socially prominent people as portraitists routinely try to do. Whether by accident or design, Modigliani’s models were sculptors, painters, poets, or the working men and women with whom he would always be in sympathy. On the other hand, if he did not need to portray a flattering image he could please himself, and it is a curious fact that not one of his subjects is ever smiling. They may be thoughtful, wary, staring, withdrawn. They are often sensuous, even poetic. Even so, many of his sitters give one a sense of life on the edge; they seem imbued with a pervasive sadness. That summer of 1913 when he felt himself restored to life one more time brought about his comment, “Happiness is an angel with a grave face.” No one who had endured what he had, and survived, could possibly think otherwise.

  One morning Paul Guillaume went to meet Modigliani in his studio and found him still asleep; he had to wake him up. Modigliani explained that he had spent most of the night at a boisterous party and invited the guest to sit down while he made himself presentable. He then took out a zinc jug, minus a handle, which he used instead of the humble chamber pot, went out into the corridor, where running water and a sink were usually to be found, emptied the jug out in the communal sink, and returned shortly with the same ju
g, full of fresh water. He explained that it was the Jewish custom to wash oneself as thoroughly as possible on rising, and also rinse out one’s mouth to clear the mind. Which he did. After these ablutions he was dressed and ready to talk.

  Guillaume, the kind of city sophisticate who wore spats, folded his breast pocket handkerchief at the exact angle, and bought his suits in London, was naturally appalled at such dangerously primitive notions of sanitation. But they needed each other. The sophistication shown in Modigliani’s work was deeply attractive to Guillaume’s refined tastes. On the other hand Modigliani could not possibly break into the art market without the imprimatur of someone like Guillaume. Besides, for a time the dealer believed he alone saw the greatness of Modigliani’s work. This was not quite true. But certainly few collectors or dealers took Modigliani seriously. “They laughed at his drawings. They paid no attention to his paintings, and his friends at the time were definitely not those who claimed to be his friends later,” Guillaume wrote, no doubt with a meaningful reference to Salmon and others. Guillaume guided Modigliani’s career for about two years, from 1914–15 to mid-1917, after which he amiably relinquished that role to Zborowski but continued to sell Modiglianis.

  Guillaume recalled that at the start of their relationship Modigliani was living with Hastings and sometimes worked at her apartment, or at Haviland’s, sometimes at his own studio or the cottage in Montmartre. Guillaume was in awe: he was painting “with passion, with violence, temperamentally, extravagantly.” There is no question that being represented by such a successful young dealer, one about to move into the prestigious rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, was an enormous boost to Modigliani’s self-confidence. He seemed to have found himself and was dedicating himself “to the most complete and perfect aesthetic transfiguration of his inner imagery.”