Meryle Secrest

  Basler to the contrary, the painter Léopold Survage always said that Modigliani’s biggest problem, at least at first, was finding models, since professional ones, who charged five francs a sitting, were far beyond his means. People made all kinds of excuses. Women would say they were not pretty enough. Men were too busy. He would sometimes approach strangers in cafés, or even on the streets, with scant success. “But once he got someone to agree to an appointment he would be there waiting, early in the morning, nervously. Sometimes he would go out onto the street to wait for the model’s arrival. Sometimes the model did not show up and then his disappointment was great,” Survage wrote.

  He usually began by sketching, with a very fine brush, a drawing similar to his well-known pencil drawings; sometimes soft and tender, sometimes hard and violent, according to the character of his sitter and his own mood. The more studied and deliberate elements were combined with a fair measure of improvisation. Starting from an initial conception of main lines and angulations, which represented the sitter and extended outwards to take in surrounding objects such as chairs, tables, wall corners and door and window frames, he scattered, rhythmically and in a strictly geometrical style, a flood of detail that was painted with great delicacy and force. So fond was he of fathoming the unfathomable that it did not weary him to do seventeen or even nineteen portraits of the same person at near intervals.

  “This work made for great nervous strain,” Survage continued, “for it required an uninterrupted flow of rapidly changing perceptions at the psychological level to be expressed by a procedure that pushed the geometrization of forms to its extreme.” “The remedy was close at hand—a glass of red wine and a small glass of grappa, after which he would get right back to work.”

  Another of Modigliani’s subjects was Léon Indenbaum, a sculptor from Vilna, Lithuania. The two became friendly after Modigliani moved in with Hastings—they all shared the same courtyard. Modigliani painted him in 1915. It came about in an interesting way. At about two a.m. one night Modigliani was sitting on a bench outside the Rotonde, apparently drunk, just as Indenbaum was leaving the restaurant. Indenbaum sat down beside him. Modigliani placed a companionable hand on his friend’s shoulder and there they sat, for perhaps half an hour, wordlessly. Finally Modigliani turned to him and said, “Do you have any paints?” Indenbaum did. He also had some canvases. “Fine,” Modigliani replied, “I’ll paint your portrait tomorrow.”

  The sculptor Léon Indenbaum, painted by Modigliani, 1915 (image credit 11.2)

  Modigliani was there bright and early the next morning, clean and freshly shaven, wearing a blue-checked shirt and black string tie. Indenbaum was storing a motley group of paintings that had been donated as a benefit for a friend of Rivera’s who was ill, so there was plenty of potentially usable canvas to choose from. “Help yourself,” he offered. Modigliani picked up each painting in turn, looked at it carefully, shook his head, and replaced it, evidently deciding the picture was too good to paint over. He finally settled on a small still life and began work.

  It took him three mornings to paint Indenbaum, a young man losing his hair, expressionless, with a curiously pointed chin, his name strung out in the background. After the third sitting Modigliani judged it finished, signed it, and gave it to Indenbaum. The sculptor would not accept it, but the artist insisted: “I shall be really offended if you don’t”; so Indenbaum took it. He decided later that Modigliani’s generous offer was in payment of a debt. When he briefly had some money himself he had bought one of Modigliani’s heads to help him out, but never claimed it. After a decent interval, Modigliani sold the head to someone else. So he thought no more about it. But the day came when he, with a young baby to feed, needed some extra cash. So he took his portrait along to Chéron, who would buy anything. Just as he was leaving the dealer’s premises, whom should he meet but Modigliani in his signature corduroys, head held high. Indenbaum, embarrassed, said, “I’ve just sold your portrait.” Modigliani replied, “Quite right, too,” without a moment’s hesitation. “Don’t worry, I’ll paint you another one.” But he never did.

  Fellow artists were the easiest to persuade because they were the quickest to regard the request as a compliment and always had flexible hours. Modigliani had as many sculptors as artists among his “copains,” casual acquaintances, and a few close friends. Jacques Lipchitz became one of them. Born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz in a village on the Niemen River in Russia, like so many other young Jewish émigrés he went to Paris to study art in 1909. On arrival, and for simplicity’s sake, he had his name changed to Jacques Lipchitz. His first exhibition drew praise from Rodin and he was on his way to fame when he met Modigliani in 1913. He recalls being introduced by Max Jacob in the Jardins du Luxembourg, where Modigliani had spent so many happy hours with Akhmatova, and perhaps it was no accident that Modigliani promptly launched into excerpts from The Divine Comedy, declaimed at the top of his voice. Lipchitz, by nature modest and retiring, was taken aback by this public display of erudition. But, seven years Modigliani’s junior, he was immediately intrigued by the older man’s romantic appearance—even in shabby corduroys, he exuded a kind of aristocratic elegance—his easy manner, enthusiasm, and passion for art. His was a rich nature, Lipchitz wrote, “so lovable, so gifted with talent, with sensitivity, with intelligence, with courage. And he was generous—promiscuous, even—with his gifts, which he scattered recklessly to the winds.”

  In 1916 and just married, Lipchitz signed a contract with the dealer Léonce Rosenberg and had a little money to spare. So he and his wife Berthe decided to ask Modigliani to paint their portrait, with the idea that the pose would be based on a recent wedding photograph. Modigliani said his price was ten francs a sitting plus a little alcohol, which seemed perfectly reasonable, so they set a time for the following day in Lipchitz’s studio.

  Jacques Lipchitz and his wife in Paris, c. 1920 (image credit 11.3)

  “He … made a lot of preliminary drawings, one right after the other, with tremendous speed and precision.” The next day he arrived with paints and an old canvas and the couple began to pose. “I see him so clearly even now—sitting in front of his canvas, which he had put on a chair, working quietly.” Lipchitz already knew that Modigliani was subject to paroxysms of coughing that caused him to double up. So he had provided a bottle—probably some brandy—to quiet the spasms and allow the artist to go on working. “From time to time he would get up and glance critically over his work and look at his models. By the end of the day he said, ‘Well, I guess it’s finished.’ We looked at our double portrait which, in effect, was finished. But then I felt some scruples at having the painting at the modest price of ten francs; it had not occurred to me that he could do two portraits on one canvas in a single session.” On the other hand Lipchitz knew Modigliani would be deeply offended if he made any kind of offer that could be construed as charity. So he demurred, using the excuse of a higher finish for another sitting, and an extra ten francs. Modigliani shrugged. “Well,” he said, “if you want me to spoil it, I can continue.” Modigliani went on for another week without appreciably adding much. The painter was happy, the sitters were happy, and the result was, Lipchitz believed, that Modigliani worked on their portrait longer than he did anyone else’s.

  The painting, now at the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of Modigliani’s most self-assured and least ambiguous. Unlike Bride and Groom of the year before, which is an experiment in geometrics, resulting in figures that look like blocks of wood, the Lipchitz portrait is a model of relaxed and graceful ease. The sculptor, one hand in a pocket and the other on his wife’s shoulder, stands negligently behind his seated bride. The composition is diagonal; the palette, though confined to a limited spectrum of dark greens, browns, and off-blacks, is curiously spritely, even gay, and the expressions of the bride and groom add to the air of quiet contentment. It was the only other wedding portrait Modigliani would paint, and one of his best-known works.

  In the final category of sitters are fri
ends of friends, such as Lunia Czechowska. She and her husband knew the Polish poet and art dealer Léopold Zborowski (“Zbo”), who would figure so largely in the remaining years of Modigliani’s life. In 1916 Zbo took them to see Modigliani’s work on view at the Lyre et Palette exhibition. After leaving they, with a group of painters, walked over to the terrace of the Rotonde and found a table. “I can still see him crossing the boulevard du Montparnasse, a handsome young man wearing a large black felt hat, a velvet suit with a red cummerbund, pencils in his pockets and an enormous folio of drawings under his arm. Modigliani came and sat beside me. I was struck by his air of distinction, radiance and the beauty of his eyes. He seemed to me very simple and very noble. Even the way he shook one’s hand was distinctive and unlike anyone else.”

  She agreed to pose and Modigliani, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, began work. Like Zbo and Lipchitz, Czechowska was among the few who knew how ill he was. Because tuberculosis had reached epidemic proportions it was talked about in whispers. Czechowska’s particular circumlocution was that his health was “very delicate” and that “he only drank if tormented by a particular problem,” meaning, to soothe his coughing fits. To call him an alcoholic was outrageous.

  She thought that very few people penetrated his reserve to arrive at his true personality. “This was a real artist: ordinary people could not understand such a person and the torments he endured. I am convinced that alcohol was not necessary to his genius but it was a refuge … that allowed him to forget his difficulties.” Not a vice, but “a kind of anesthetic.” Modigliani would eventually paint her portrait fourteen times.

  Lunia Czechowska, in one of her many portraits by Modigliani, 1917 (image credit 11.4)

  Whether Beatrice Hastings also knew Modigliani had consumption is one of the many questions that cannot be answered satisfactorily. However, it is difficult to live on close terms with someone who constantly coughs up blood without suspecting something. Her comment on the impossibility of abandoning him to his fate clearly indicates that she did know. She also complains that her health is not good, which might also be code for her fear that she, too, would come down with the same affliction. There is a further factor to be considered. One of her friends was Simone Thiroux, a young Canadian, blond and voluptuous, who had inherited a modest fortune from her parents. She was in Paris to study medicine but was fascinated by the art world and spent her time hanging around Montparnasse. Hastings was on such comfortable terms with her that when she took her trip to England in 1914, she wrote Simone a postcard asking her to look after Modigliani if she did not return. Thiroux was also tubercular and it seems inconceivable that she would not recognize the same symptoms in Dedo and not have warned Beatrice. She took the injunction to take care of him seriously, whether Beatrice was around or not. During sittings for the Lipchitz painting she was in constant attendance. It was a wet, dreary winter and every afternoon she would appear with dry shoes, overshoes, extra jackets, and scarves, a model of tender concern. Far from being grateful, Modigliani said she was “a wet chicken,” i.e., a softy, and found the whole thing deeply embarrassing. Or so he said.

  Another issue that will not be solved is whether Hastings had Modigliani’s child. She told Thora Klinköwstrom, later Dardel, a young Swede who posed for Modigliani, that she had carried his child, a little girl, but that the baby had died. It is hard to believe anything from a woman capable of weaving such a moonbeam cocoon of fantasy around herself. Too, one has to doubt whether someone who boasted about the number of her lovers would ever know whose father it was. Still, given that she was telling the truth, and if it is just conceivable that the child she had was Modigliani’s, that would help explain his fury when he learned that she had taken a new lover, an even handsomer Italian sculptor, Alfredo Pina, then working as one of Rodin’s many apprentices. Beatrice was in love again, and so was Simone—with Modigliani. By then, he and she were already lovers, or not: it hardly matters. Beà “abandoned” Dedo, as she wrote, or was it the other way around? The fact is that such a relationship was bound to end badly.

  Hostilities began in earnest one evening in the early summer of 1916 when Hastings caught Modigliani and Thiroux in a tête-à-tête at the Rotonde. She picked up a glass and, true to her publicly stated belief that a woman in a rage can start throwing things with impunity, aimed it, not at her faithless lover, but her friend. The glass caught Simone just above an eye and shattered, leaving a permanent scar. But at least she could still see.

  If one can believe an eyewitness, their worst fight centered around, one assumes, the final months of their life together. Since the cafés closed early it became customary for a group of friends to continue the fun at somebody’s house; that evening it was 13 rue Norvins in Montmartre. Marevna, who was in the party, wrote, “To reach the [house] we went up steps from the street, through a little garden and into a well-lighted room on the ground floor, furnished with a bureau, a table, chairs, a sofa, shelves full of books, a mountain of sandwiches and bottles of every kind.” Besides Max Jacob there were Ilya Ehrenburg and his wife Katya and a number of others, a list Marevna apparently could still recall fifty years later when she came to write her memoir (in 1972).

  She claims that Modigliani and Hastings, who were already drunk, began one of their arguments. Soon they were pommeling and kicking each other. Then, Marevna writes, “The next thing we knew, he had seized her and hurled her through the closed window. A shattering of glass, a scream and all that remained visible of Beatrice Hastings was her legs, dangling over the windowsill—the rest of her was in the garden.”

  This episode, frequently repeated, is cited as proof of Modigliani’s drunken violence toward women. On the other hand, as Simon Gray observes, by the time Marevna wrote she had had a tempestuous affair with Diego Rivera, who had often been violent and abusive. She wanted the world to know “that the women of the great macho painters of the day had a bad time of it and could be sorely abused.”

  What this account lacks is verisimilitude. It strains credulity to believe that Modigliani, at five feet three or four, and now ill, could have summoned the strength to toss Beà through a window with the necessary force to break glass. But even if, for the sake of argument, this did happen, the assembled crowd would have rushed her to hospital to examine her for concussion, not to mention shards of glass embedded in her body. This was not what happened, according to Marevna. The blood-streaked victim was supposedly covered with a blanket, her lover babbled that it was not his fault and sang songs to distract her. The night wore on. Finally everyone ended up sleeping on the floor among broken glasses, spilled wine, upturned chairs, and wallpaper in shreds, with the victim asleep on the sofa. So Marevna writes; how truthfully is another question. Did she elaborate on a minor incident, the only kernel of truth being that Hastings fell or was pushed backward and ended up against a window? She does state that Jacob was there, known to be an incorrigible gossip; if true, her version of events would have been all over Montparnasse the next day and would certainly have ended up in that compendium of gossip, Artist Quarter, but it does not appear. By the time Marevna published her account there was no one left to contradict it, or her.

  Beatrice Hastings in 1924. “Very ill,” she notes, cause unknown. (image credit 11.5)

  Minnie Pinnikin, which survives in fragmentary form, takes extended flight through a world in which Pâtredor, or Pinarius (“Penurious”?), paints, free-associates, engages in numbing generalities with Minnie Pinnikin (who always looks on the bright side), and then pauses to admire the non sequiturs. They are about to get married, and they also seem to be on an Alice Through the Looking Glass edge, passing from reality into a dream landscape, or from a dream landscape into a void. In any event they inhabit the same fantasy and in it Pâtredor is shopping for wedding presents. He gives Minnie Pinnikin a star, a blue flower, a wave from the sea, and “a golden flying snake.” He apologizes: “I am not as wealthy as I used to be. I would have offered you a wheel, an elephant, a jewel, and a so
n. Today I have only small things left but I will work hard to regain the fortune I lost in the cataclysm.” Their cloudlike mirage is iridescent, inhabited by children, angels, and bony horses “as light as hope.” There are wells, holes through which you fall into a void, and other holes that make you rise up, corridors without end and doors that never open. Arriving at the main door a voice commands them to enter. But then, “as it always happens in dreams,” Minnie Pinnikin wakes up.

  Beatrice Hastings in later years (image credit 11.6)

  Their magical vistas, hedged in by some very real, unexamined limitations, had vanished. “How simple things were at the beginning,” she wrote later, at the end of another failed relationship, words she might have plausibly said to Dedo. “But we’ve become too unhappy with one another to be reasonable.” Pâtredor was now “a liar and a thief and a thick-skinned, death’s-head, bourgeois spirited …” He was somebody she no longer recognized. She held no very great opinion of herself either, beneath the studiously cultivated façade of poet. “I feel I’m one of the most foul beings nature ever yet invented.” Impossible hopes; unbearable realities; it would all end in an alcoholic haze in a bedsitter in Eastbourne. In 1943 Hastings turned on the tap of a gas fire, lay down beside it, and committed suicide at the age of sixty-four. But just then she had the consolation of Alfredo, who also had talent, was as handsome and perhaps a more receptive candidate for the cobweb bridge she would fling across his mind, as Edith Wharton wrote of Henry James. Whatever she had told him about Dedo apparently ignited a fury of retaliation that involved a gun, probably hers. Alfredo prepared for vengeance.