Modigliani by ACC Art Books

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements 4 Preface 5 Introduction 7 SCULPTURE 12 FIRST MATURE PAINTINGS 24 FEMALE NUDES 40 SOUTH OF FRANCE 56 LATER PORTRAITS OF WOMEN 66 FINAL SELF-PORTRAIT 85 Notes 88 Useful Reading 89 German Translation 90

CONTENTS

SCULPTURE

fragment, with the form ending at the neck and shoulders placed unnaturally flat on. Her rocambolesque head slices the space around her. The long plait tracing the neckline is also present in the painter’s prior sculptures. The expression resembling a jocular grimace suggests the voguish influence of African masks on art in Paris during this period. The bold inscription partly occluded by the head refers equally again to sculptural reliefs, as well as collage and posters, his art veering between the venerable and popular. Stylistically, the painting is also reminiscent of the by then already legendary Toulouse-Lautrec, who had died in 1901, in its dominant graphic quality and sense of tangible excitement in recording public nightlife (entirely different to his contemporaries Bonnard and Vuillard). At this point in the mid-1910s, Modigliani was starting to abandon the fractured, disintegrating palette of the French Fauves for the more subtly modulated, tremu lous surfaces that would define his mature style. The hot speckled light mimicking the electrified quality of a café interior and the chalky, almost friable, chaotic surface are the result of the rapid execution aligned to the subject’s interpretation. Lighting touches both the flesh and the wall behind to evoke the burning jewel description in Baudelaire’s text. This was an ambitious experiment and ultimately an unfruitful potential direction, as Modigliani increasingly exploited his own life and relationships for subject matter.

6. PORTRAIT OF PAUL GUILLAUME After accepting that his career as a sculptor abruptly ended around 1915, Modigliani became an old-fashioned easel painter, favouring compact portable canvases for his two preferred genres: portraits and female nudes. One of the earliest of his mature portraits is of Paul Guillaume, the artist’s dealer between 1914 and 1916. Modigliani did not have much commercial success, and portraits of friends are, not surprisingly, a considerable part of his output. The artist worked mainly with those who would tolerate his behaviour and were less expensive or even gratis as models. Formally commissioned portraits were presumably then relatively few. For him, the dealer portrait fell within that

PORTRAIT OF PAUL GUILLAUME Milan, Museo del Novecento. Canvas, 81 x 54 cm. Dated 1916

FIG. 4 Portrait of Beatrice Hastings as Madame Pompadour, Chicago, Art Institute. Canvas, 61.1 x 50.2 cm. Dated 1915

PORTRAIT OF BEATRICE HASTINGS (Woman with a Velvet Ribbon), Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie. Cardboard, 54 x 45.4 cm, c. 1915

FIG. 4 Portrait of Beatrice Hastings as Madame Pompadour, Chicago, Art Institute. Canvas, 61.1 x 50.2 cm. Dated 1915

PORTRAIT OF BEATRICE HASTINGS (Woman with a Velvet Ribbon), Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie. Cardboard, 54 x 45.4 cm, c. 1915

Modigliani painted a different image of the Venus Pudica, another subject traceable to an ancient artist, Praxiteles, and using a courtesan, Phryne, as a model. This image survives in a private collection and has the same dimensions. Compared to that more vacuous and conventional treatment, it is notable how the handling of this picture shifts any interpretation of the image. This Venus is a phantasmagoria. The dense encrusted surface, disruptive and disintegrating is part of the content; paint literally hangs off the front of the canvas. It is unusual among this group of 1917 nudes for its open technique, with some of the bare, oatmeal-coloured canvas left visible and paint so thick in places it resembles mosaic tiles. The open handling seems emotional, even temporally passionate. The long hair is animated with scratches from the end of the brush, and fingerprints are detectable in the coagulated paint. It is a type of sentient picture, not optical, extending the limits of oil on canvas and anticipating abstract painting in certain pliable immersive effects. The same passages recall details of Cubist painting but in an even more daring manner. The maniacal futility to this diamantine exercise evokes unfinished, abandoned sculptures by Michelangelo. All the drama is on the surface of the canvas in swirling, patchy areas, but it is still solid and entirely tactile to the extent there is no view through into another space. There is little attempt at a resolution — the painting was abandoned as finished as it needed to be to satisfy the artist.

13. RECLINING NUDE The painting is rare but not unique as a markedly unfinished treatment of the nude by Modigliani. It could almost be a study for the two other versions of the subject of reclining nude, both in private collections, except that preparatory is too simplistic and restrictive a notion for this artist and the sequence of these cognate works is unclear. It is more the summary of a picture that the others take slightly further towards conclusion but in which sequence is difficult to guess. Indeed, the sketch (bozzetto in Italian) was a venerable type itself in art history, traceable to the later Renaissance and Baroque periods, so the work is not necessarily to be classified as unfinished. Paintings of this degree of incompleteness had long been collected as satisfying objects unto themselves, often

RECLINING NUDE Rome, Galleria Nazionale. Canvas, 73 x 116 cm, c. 1919

being preferred by collectors to highly finished works. Considering how the surface was left, it is impossible to imagine how the picture would have eventually been

RECLINING NUDE Rome, Galleria Nazionale. Canvas, 73 x 116 cm, c. 1919

being preferred by collectors to highly finished works. Considering how the surface was left, it is impossible to imagine how the picture would have eventually been

SERVANT GIRL Buffalo, Albright-Knox Museum. Canvas, 152 x 61 cm, c. 1918

25. SELF-PORTRAIT, SÃO PAULO For an artist who mostly painted friends and colleagues and had an out-sized personality, Modigliani produced surprisingly few self-portraits, as if it were sufficient for him to project his feelings onto every other subject. He was not prone to the particular type of introspection or vanity required to make them in contrast to contemporary artists like Gauguin, Picasso, Bonnard and others for whom self-portraiture could be an obsession. Also, for a painter who otherwise needed to find models, it implies a certain technical, if not psychological discomfort in their production. Indeed, this work is not his most probing likeness, although it is redolent with emotion acknowledging its date: Modigliani memorialised many others, especially Jeanne Hébuterne towards the end of their lives, rather than himself, except here by sad coincidence, considering the events about to unfold. This very late canvas has a restrained formality suggesting a distance from the self, not attempting to embody the hopelessness of his condition, the fulsome knotted scarf indicating a state of recuperation and healing. The confident shape of the fabric is an especially accomplished detail. He appears more youthful than he truly was. Yet the rounded head and almost feline features have a carved permanence to them, like the wooden sculpture of a saint he would have recalled from Italian museums and churches, accentuated by the silhouetted side view that also indicates a deliberate desire to hide from the spectator. The burgundy suit resembles a shadow made of fabric. The palette full of paint is held flat to the spectator like a mirror or an oblique declaration of the painter’s craft, a resplen dent window into the heart. There are hints of canvases in the lower part of the image — an inadvertent continuity with the Paul Guillaume portrait of about five years prior, but this very canvas is the one painted with those colours on the palette. Modigliani is, finally, the painting that he is painting. Modigliani died in Paris on 24 January 1920, aged just thirty-five.

SELF-PORTRAIT, SÃO PAULO Brazil. Canvas, 100 x 64.5 cm, c. 1919