Meryle Secrest

  One can safely see her as a crucial emotional anchor in the chaos of his life. One can also see him in a lover’s fever of anticipation. They became lovers on or before May 17, 1917, according to Patrice Chaplin in Into the Darkness Laughing. Hébuterne wrote to her friend Germaine Labaye that Modigliani took her to the Hotel Dieu and she ended up with her underclothes torn. “A night not without a certain horror,” was her laconic comment. Shortly afterward she was in another Paris hotel, they had made love, and she was again writing to Germaine. This letter probably came a month later while her parents were on holiday in Normandy. She had returned to Paris alone, not an easy case to make in the days when respectable unmarried women did not travel without a chaperone. The point of the letter was that she regretted nothing. She then moved in with Modigliani, probably in one of his seedy hotel rooms. Restellini’s study of that period states that her parents knew nothing of the affair for over a year. She spent the day with him, returning innocently every evening to the rue Amyot; she explained her occasional overnight stays by pretending that she was staying with friends. It was a performance worthy of Modigliani and proof, if nothing else, of her spectacular ability to keep a secret. Her mother finally guessed the truth in the spring of 1918 when Jeanne could no longer deny that she was pregnant.

  If public health authorities in France and elsewhere in Europe were alarmed enough to try to educate the public to limit the spread of tuberculosis that message, at least in Modigliani’s case, fell on deaf ears, including the warnings against close contact. His behavior was the height of recklessness as he went from one woman to another, exposing her to tuberculosis and also unprotected sex, that led all too often to the predictable results. Was Maud Abrantes pregnant with his child, and was this the reason she returned to her husband, and had she passed the child off as his? What about Beà, who might or might not have had a child by him and who, in any case, could have contracted his disease? What about the sweet, doomed, careless Simone Thiroux, who, in August 1916, did become pregnant with a child she said was his? What about Jeanne herself, with her Catholic upbringing, whom he impregnated in the spring of 1918? She could not be expected to protect herself, but prophylactics of a sort were available for men. If so, this was something Modigliani ignored, with the transparently self-serving statement that the greatest gift a man could give a woman was a baby.

  In Simone’s case, he had to know that she could not live long enough to care for Serge Gérard, the little boy who was born in May 1917. She made no bones about her own serious condition. Coughing, bringing up blood, she would treat it all as a great joke, ignoring the truth until she could ignore it no longer. From Modigliani’s point of view it was not his child, could not be, because she was promiscuous. This makes a certain sense if one suspects that he had, indeed, discovered her with another lover. On the other hand he also knew he could not support a wife and child. At least, that is the reason he gave then. Émile Lejeune recalled a conversation on this subject after the birth of Serge. Simone Thiroux, penniless, begged him for work. Lejeune reports that Modigliani said, “It’s a shame that I made a kid, but these things can happen to anybody. Isn’t that right? Anyway, Simone and I were finished by then.

  “So what would I have done with this baby? Someone like me, who has never had a penny, was I made to be the father of a family? It’s sad but that’s the way it is.” Modigliani continued to deny his paternity even though his friends saw a startling resemblance in the two-year-old Serge, and since he refused to acknowledge the boy there was nothing the mother could do about it. He continued to reject Simone’s efforts at a reconciliation. She wrote a letter sometime in 1919 begging to see him, presumably just after Jeanne was born. “I loved you too much, and I suffer so much that I ask this as a final plea.” She was not asking for recognition for Serge, “just a little less hate from you.” Whether or not Modigliani replied is not known.

  What was he thinking? Had he no regard for the desperate game he was playing, not just with his own life, but the lives of others? Was he still arguing, as he did with Ghiglia all those years before, that “[p]eople like us … have different rights, different values than do normal, ordinary people because we have different needs which put us … above their moral standards”? That would have been predictable. In fairness, it must be said that he treated Jeanne as any self-respecting Italian male would have treated a wife, even though they were not married. His behavior uncannily mirrors the tongue-in-cheek stereotype drawn by Barzini of the peacock male and his harem. He is out on the town making contacts and conquests; she stays in the house, keeping his life functioning smoothly, and ministers to his every need. He also made a serious effort to house her. Thanks to his new dealer they moved into a two-room studio in July 1917, that is to say shortly after they took up life together. There was, of course, no kitchen, bathroom or toilet, running water, or central heat. But given the hovels he had inhabited this third-floor walk-up was almost luxurious. It was on the rue de la Grande Chaumière, right around the corner from everything in the heart of Montparnasse. At no. 8, it was a few doors from the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, at no. 14, and next door to the Académie Colarossi, at no. 10, where Jeanne was studying when they met. She could slip in and out for art lessons almost without leaving home. The apartment consisted of two spacious rooms in an L shape, with banks of windows overlooking a pleasant interior courtyard. Once the lease was signed, Lunia Czechowska and Hanka Zborowska swept, mopped, painted, and scrubbed it. They found a stove, the universal source of heat, and a few pieces of furniture. Modigliani decorated his work space walls in orange and ochre before he moved in. Czechowska wrote, “His joy was such that we were all shaken by it. Poor dear friend, he finally had a corner of his own.” So did Jeanne Hébuterne.

  Like Guillaume, Léopold Zborowski was a young man in a hurry, one taking maximum advantage of the preeminent position of Paris in the marketplace of ideas. The better-established artists already being represented, it was Modigliani’s good luck that there were few artists not at the front at a moment when Zborowski was struggling to establish himself. His timing was strangely apt. He had arrived in Paris from Poland to study at the École du Louvre or perhaps the Sorbonne, a month before the outbreak of World War I. After a brief period of being interned he was released with no means of support. He showed his resourcefulness along with superior connoisseurship—he was in his early twenties—by buying books and manuscripts their unsuspecting owners did not realize were valuable, and selling them at a tidy profit. He had a sensitive appreciation for art and, since he was friendly with Kisling, was soon offering to help him sell. That was another success, and before long he was representing Utrillo and joined the Kislings in the same apartment block at 3 rue Joseph Bara. Kisling had a studio up under the roof and the Zborowskis were in the apartment below. This turned out to be the best idea of all because, as a neighbor of the sociable Kislings, Zborowski had automatic entry into the inner circles of Montparnasse, its streams of artists, sculptors, poet-critics, dealers, and eccentrics. Zborowski, who by then had met Hanka, an honorary wife, was just the kind of person the crowd loved, a businessman with a poetic streak who wore his hat at a jaunty angle and was ready to take on anyone. This was good, because Utrillo was a hopeless alcoholic, Modigliani had been turned down by everybody in the past, and his dear friend Soutine, painting his hideous writhing canvases in rags, was not fit for decent company. No doubt everyone was soon quoting Zborowski’s poetry: “Maintenant silence / et subitement avec la brume tombante / l’accordéon parle d’amour aux filles de cuisine et au balayeurs de la rue.”

  Modigliani’s art dealer, Léopold Zborowski, 1918 (image credit 12.1)

  Zborowski was also a gambler, and when he became rich in years to come lived on a princely scale with fur coats and chauffeurs. Perhaps something about Zborowski’s confidence, his largesse, and his splendid self-assurance reminded Modigliani of his much-loved uncle Amédée. At any rate, he was ready to leave Guillaume, who now had canvases of
his own to unload, and being courted by Zborowski was a definite plus. Whether or not he was ever helped in negotiations by Jeanne, who was, after all, a businessman’s daughter, he bargained for and got favorable terms. Guillaume had paid for a studio; now he wanted Zborowski to pay for one, and got it. He also received a daily stipend of fifteen francs, which included canvas, paints, and models, and his contract further stipulated that Zborowski also represent Soutine. Zborowski even threw in a room in his own apartment. His rather large dining room was expendable, so it was appropriated by Modigliani as a studio, and most of his portraits and nudes were painted there during the next two years. Zborowski, not knowing how valuable this contact with Soutine would prove to be, agreed with reluctance, and Hanka would not have him in the house.

  In turn Zborowski wanted Modigliani to start painting nudes. This made the best possible business sense. It was all very well to paint portraits, but if the subjects did not buy them the chances of encountering someone else who would were small, as Romaine Brooks found when the time came to stop exhibiting and start selling—and she never did. Nudes were bound to make people stop and look. Modigliani had frequently drawn nudes but never painted them; still, he seems to have agreed readily enough. They are now among his most famous works; a reclining nude sold at Christie’s in New York in 2004 for $26.9 million.

  One can admire any of Modigliani’s nude studies for its painterly qualities, its air of assurance, its bravado sweeps of the brush that, with great economy of means, convey the weight of a coverlet, a flash of light in the background, or those tiny, pleasing details that echo the main theme so satisfyingly. One admires most of all the lyrical loveliness of line. Years after he began a search for the simplified line, which Mauroner saw as “a solution to his search for the essential meaning of life,” he perfected it in his magnificent nudes. The female form, idealized, stretches itself out across his canvases in “all the lineaments of gratified desire,” as William Blake wrote. This is innocent pleasure and acceptance, “generous, natural and calm.” One thinks of the painter himself, removing his clothes and arching his back in an unself-conscious celebration of life.

  For in fact these works are “as simple, sensuous and passionate as the poetry of Keats,” to quote Kenneth Clark in The Nude. Masks disguise truths; his nudes reveal the essential nature of Modigliani himself. The rage and terrible resentments revealed by Maldoror are the mirror images of a rapturous response to the beauty of life, as revealed by the female form. One might say that this deeply feeling person, crippled by illness, terribly wounded in the past, was fashioning a poetic tribute, a salute to the life he was leaving. He hardly seemed to need a moment’s doubt or hesitation. He just began.

  Modigliani’s nudes are all the more remarkable in the context of his time, when measured against Cézanne’s awkward, bulging figures, Matisse’s pseudo-abstractions, and, especially, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. Clark wrote of Matisse’s Blue Nude, “The enjoyment of continuous surfaces, easy transitions, and delicate modeling which had seemed such an essential factor in painting the nude is sacrificed to violent transitions and emphatic simplifications.” As for Picasso’s monumental painting of 1913, his “relation to the nude has been a scarcely resolved struggle between love and hatred,” and this painting “is the triumph of hate. Starting from a brothel theme … it developed into an enraged protest at everything involved in the conventional notion of beauty.” In Modigliani, Werner Schmalenbach writes that the Futurists, an Italian movement in literature and the fine arts that Modigliani never joined, decreed on its founding (1909) that no one paint nudes for the next ten years.

  “The futurists … had no moral objections,” Schmalenbach wrote; “they disapproved of the female nude because it was the epitome of tradition in painting.” They might have disapproved less if, at that date, Modigliani’s nudes already existed. These, as it turned out, shocked the bourgeoisie, one of the main aims of the new movement. Schmalenbach thought Modigliani’s position, bridging contemporary trends and the art of the past, was anomalous. “No other painter, in our century or in any other, has painted the female human body as he did. And yet his nudes evoke involuntary associations of Classicism. They are a continuation of a great tradition of European painting, not only thematically but also in the ‘spiritual’ interpretation of the theme, insofar as they constitute a celebration of beauty, immaculateness and perfection, and thus an idealization of physical Nature.” For a sensualist Modigliani’s nudes are naturalness personified, the opposite of the vulgar or obscene. For a classicist they are interpretations, not of ideal form, but naked human flesh. Lovers of Victorian nudes shudder at the indecency of it all. For everyone else, here is the work of a master of finesse, exhibiting sensitive appreciation and a delicacy of understanding.

  Having two dealers with some sort of stake in his future enormously improved Modigliani’s chances of getting exhibited. He showed three portraits at the Salon d’Antin exhibition in the summer of 1916, but no nudes. By then he was working on his first six paintings, and these are uneven in quality. As illustrated in Ceroni, one or two look stiff and labored and it took time for Modigliani to develop his sureness of approach. The National Gallery’s reclining nude, now one of the treasures in the Chester Dale collection, is by far the best of this group, a forerunner of his superb series of seated and reclining nudes in 1917–18. The majority make references to the reality of underarm hair and contain decorous hints of pubic hair. These were among the thirty-seven works shown when Modigliani had his first one-man show late in 1917, including many portraits and drawings. Because Zborowski did not yet have a gallery of his own, the show was held at the Galerie B. Weill, 50 rue Taitbout in the ninth arrondissement. Weill was a “prickly, peppery schoolmarm of a woman,” according to Richardson, who had learned how to sell by working for an antique dealer and, once she had a gallery of her own, would display Lautrec and Daumier prints by hanging them like laundry on a clothesline. She had befriended, and sold, Picasso when he was poor, treating him with scrupulous fairness and declining to be offended when he ditched her for a bigger dealer as soon as possible. She sold Matisse as early as 1902, supported Dufy, helped promote Utrillo, and was now out to put Modigliani on the map.

  There was a police station across the street, as Weill well knew when she put one (or more) nudes in the window. No doubt it was meant as a publicity stunt. She invited a few carefully chosen people to a vernissage on Monday, December 3, 1917. Unlike the pattern of most such events the guests came and stayed. The door was open and before she knew it passersby joined the throng, there were crowds looking into the windows, and traffic was stopped in the street. Shortly thereafter a plainclothes policeman arrived and asked softly to have the nudes removed from the window. When Weill declined she was escorted across the road and into the office of the chief constable himself.

  Berthe Weill’s provocative poster for Modigliani’s first one-man show at her gallery, 1917. The police were called. The model for the poster was Jeanne Hébuterne. (image credit 12.2)

  Again she was asked to remove the objectionable objects. She volunteered there were lots more inside. The chief constable was visibly alarmed. Either she removed them all or he was going to impound them. It was an offense against public morals. How could that be, she asked, knowing perfectly well but making him say it. “They’ve got ppppubic hair!” That, for the moment, was that, and Zborowski only sold two drawings at thirty francs each. Weill, evidently realizing she had made a tactical error, bought five paintings so that the artist would not be too discouraged. Modigliani returned temporarily to portraits and when he tackled other nudes the offending areas were covered, as they had been since time immemorial, by lingerie, draperies, or a hand in the right place. His was the dilemma common to every artist, i.e., how to be true to his inner vision and at the same time reconcile himself with what the market wanted to buy, or was ready for at that moment. Walking such a tightrope was something he never mastered, even though he was aware that othe
rs were making a success of it. He was poised somewhere in the background, too much of an innovator to capitulate, too short of money not to hope that small concessions would induce someone to buy something. As it happened, public morals capitulated first, and sooner than he could have imagined. Five years later one of his forbidden nudes was sold at the Salle Drouot in Paris for twenty-two thousand francs.

  The writer Francis Carco was an early admirer of Modigliani’s nude canvases. He went to see them one day at 3 rue Joseph Bara in a dark empty room, canvases stacked up around the walls. Zborowski, illuminating each in turn by candlelight, rhapsodized over his treasures, stroking them, lingering over their details, and heaping scorn and vengeance on those unwilling or unable to see their worth. Just that very morning he had offered a dealer fifteen canvases, free, if he would just hang them in his gallery. The wretched man refused.

  When Carco asked to buy one Zborowski shouted with joy. He would give the painting to Carco willingly because he loved it. The writer argued in vain. “He came with me to my house, carrying that magnificent picture and refusing even at the very last minute to accept a very small sum which, not being rich, I tried to force upon him.” Zborowski waved the money away. He was about to sell some clothes and expected to raise twenty francs. That would be enough.