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

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 3

07.07.21 14:33

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank first Dirk Allgaier for his belief in my manuscript. Further, Wendy Brouwer did a superb edit and Silke Nalbach is to be praised for her beautiful design. Saskia Bontjes van Beek did a wonderful job translating into German, just as Volker Mayer did regarding image editing. Matthias Becher was steadily attentive and sensitive to every detail — the best possible partner in the completion of this project. I would also like to thank all the curators, conservators and registrars who assisted me with access to works and images. Finally, the book only exists because my friend Ash Prakash encouraged me to complete it. Ash’s own writing provided me with an inspiration I only hope I came close to honouring.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Franklin is the author of several books on Italian Art, including Rosso in Italy (1994), Painting in Renaissance Florence (2001) and Polidoro da Caravaggio (2018), all with Yale University Press. He recently co-authored a book in 2018 on a Hungarian twentieth-century photographer Gergely Papp for Bone Idle Press. He co-curated many exhibitions for the National Gallery of Canada including Italian Drawings from the NGC (2003), The Art of Parmigianino (2003), Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and the Renaissance in Florence (2005), From Raphael to the Carracci: The Art of Papal Rome (2009), and Caravaggio and his followers in Rome (2011). In 2009 he was awarded Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana by the Republic of Italy. He is currently a curator with the Archive of Modern Conflict.

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 4

07.07.21 14:33

PREFACE

Rather than a survey, the following attempts to introduce Modigliani’s art from categories of production through memorable examples. The text is motivated by the belief that he was neither a mainstream establishment artist nor fully of the avant-garde seeking innovation and continuous stylistic novelty above all else. Instead, Modigliani purposely positioned himself in Paris as an outsider who did not wish to be classified. In a period when styles altered consciously, Modigliani relentlessly exploited one particular convention throughout his maturity as a painter, and his chronology, while not static, is not always helpful or compelling for understanding his work. Yet he did not always achieve the same level of quality despite the consistency of his formats and style, and much of the work is not of interest beyond specialist or biographical accounts. Even he destroyed much of his earlier production. While Modigliani was not as obscure a painter to the public during his lifetime as romanticising myths have claimed, his was nonetheless a digressive, inverted Modernism, operating more in private than in public or within a group. Standing outside of art history without a legacy, he can be remembered for his unique contributions exploring the human condition, not for commenting on society. Four points emerge that unite this study: Modigliani had an unusually broad and sophisticated respect for the past, he worked conscious of his terrible illness and inevitable early demise, his experience as a sculptor profoundly impacted his painting, and he developed a novel, personal technique that attempted to sustain the present moment. No attempt is made here to expand the artist’s corpus via attribution, and the majority of works discussed are rather listed in Ambrogio Ceroni’s initial catalogues of Modigliani’s work.

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 5

07.07.21 14:33

There is a tendency among critics to dismiss his art as insufficiently Modern, meaning Cubist or Futurist given the specific years he was active. This view is itself indicative of something: it seems locked in the past given the definitive return to figurative painting in recent contemporary art. It is an opinion suspended in the same nostalgic distance Modigliani is often said to occupy, as we seem now better able to celebrate diverse approaches to art and are suspicious of lionising one tradition or story as superior to another. But to exclude Modigliani from Modern Art seems questionable. With regard to the Parisian avant-garde of his time, Modigliani did not ignore Cubism but was in fact one of the first to reject the movement, which shadowed him in Paris during these years, 1907—1915. His friend Max Jacob’s comedic writing ‘Thirteen Reasons Why I Didn’t Create Cubism’ suggests artists felt pressure to place themselves explicitly within or outside this dominant trending group; 1 this very exclusivity and aggressiveness would have turned some away. Modigliani was well aware of contemporary trends. Being Italian and Jewish, he apparently had no intention of respecting any French movement but openly chose an individual path and must have suffered personally from that chauvinism. He even explored the same sources in non-Western art, for ex ample, but he travelled his own direction without hesitation; indeed, the Cubist movement was already over by the time he found his signature style. Modigliani was clearly not someone who ever liked to join the crowd. Erik Satie would have sympathised with him. Even as a relatively young and unestablished artist, he refused Gino Severini’s request to sign Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto in 1909. Above all, the suspicion that art intended to be emotionally moving is too subjective and indulgent, does not address the socio-political, and is therefore to be disregarded as Modernist, effectively leaving Modigliani out of art history. This book has the merit, hopefully, of approaching the artist in ways he would have at least partly understood.

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 6

07.07.21 14:33

INTRODUCTION

Born in the port city of Livorno in western Tuscany in Italy, Modigliani received his academic training in Florence and Venice. Italy remained a touchstone for him, a beautiful mirage, and he harboured fleeting, unreasonable dreams of a return until the end of his life. He arrived in Paris in 1906. Like many coming to Paris, he had a diverse background but knew Italian art history better than any contemporaries, and that would help define him. Modigliani’s family were Sephardic Jews from Livorno in Italy, and his Jewishness was equally part of his defiant identity in Paris. Modigliani was not unique among artists in Paris for having the strength of a venerable alternate tradition extending many centuries behind him, but it was one that continually preoccupied him and differentiated him from the avant-garde. The past was not to be disrespected, and Modigliani accepted it perhaps more sincerely than any of his peers. During his academic training in Florence and Venice, the collections of the Louvre allowed him to keep his memories of Italian art alive. It seems to have been a particular responsibility for him while in a foreign place to interpret and sustain the work of his Italian predecessors. Respect for that tradition drew him as much to sculpture as to painting, both ancient and Renaissance. It also motivated him to consider contemporary art trends in Paris with objectivity and resilience. The absorption of late medieval and Renaissance painters like Simone Martini, Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Parmigianino and Titian — artists who favoured figural attenuation and graceful elegance — was equally forceful. Modigliani was the last great heir to Italian medieval and Renaissance artistic traditions. As a studious and subjective translator of these artists’ work, he discovered the anxiety and alienation in their imagery,

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 7

07.07.21 14:33

which could easily be suppressed in more anesthetised and superficial interpretations of their art, exaggerating models that were already icons of stylised beauty. Beauty was suffering for Petrarch — a belief the artist shared. In general, Modigliani’s absorption of the past was a liberating advantage for him in the present and recovered not just out of respect but in order to position himself in the 1910s as a living surrogate. It was a considered manoeuver for Modigliani to avoid the high academic style of the French nineteenth century, as well as Cubism and Futurism, and a resolutely anti-mechanical one in his unwavering celebration of human vulner ability, even if it was not a pleasant escape for him to explore images mirroring personal wounds. In contrast, Picasso’s use of African masks, for example, was to shock and manifest his protean creativity, but for Modigliani exploring the past was essentially an emotionally inspired impulse, drawn to absorbing the exotic and the exaggerated forms without simplification or caricature, or the need to distort to appear ‘modern’. Studying a wide variety of non-Western art was part of his general passion for what needed recovering. At the same, with the casualties of the First World War (many artist friends of Modigliani directly suffered too), the distorted faces on mask sculptures took on a more immediate and sorrowful connotation. Modigliani was not just knowledgeable about the history of art: he had cultivated tastes in literature and poetry and portrayed many living writers in Paris. According to Jacques Lipchitz, he knew one of these especially well, Max Jacob, who emphasised the artist’s love of poetry. Modigliani’s particular attachment to older writing, above all Dante, also distanced him from the contemporary world. As further related by Lipchitz, Modigliani read works by colourful fifteenth-century poet François Villon, which was as appropriate as it was sardonic — confessional, sometimes desperate poetry obsessed with death and spite, as well as love. He admired the visionary horror novel Les Chants de Maldoror by the short-lived Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), which he carried with him in his coat according to the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.2 It was not necessarily due to the content of the book but rather something powerfully expressed to mirror his torment and desire to shock. Most resonantly, Akhmatova apparently had an affair with Modigliani in 1910—1911, providing one of the first eye-witness testimonies of the artist from even before he had established a fully personal artistic style. He portrayed her in drawings in which she can appear almost animalistic. Akhmatova mentions that he tried to write his own poetry,

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 8

07.07.21 14:33

SCULPTURE

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 13

07.07.21 14:33

It had been Modigliani’s career ambition to become a sculptor, not a painter, according to the Welsh artist Nina Hamnett, who met him in 1914, as recorded by his daughter Jeanne,11 and about two dozen sculptures were included in Ceroni’s essential monograph. As a painter, Modigliani’s obsession with sculpture had contemporary parallels in others like Gauguin and Picasso, but in his case it was specifically rooted in Italian art history. His bold project to create a series of cognate stone heads is a direct emulation of Michelangelo’s equally ill-fated Pope Julius II tomb, an even more overly ambitious enterprise. Modigliani exploited a hybrid variety of sources from medieval Italian to all non-Western cultures, and it is not always clear when examining a sculpture that he favoured any particular school, such was his ability to sublimate observations. Despite his eclecticism, attested to by the artist’s early collector, the doctor Paul Alexandre, Modigliani always practiced a distinctive style. He was not patriotic or elitist in his taste. Sculpture satisfied his desire to put a physical object into the world and was more inherently ostentatious than painting, an ancient art form surviving to the present, which must have also appealed to him. Modigliani practiced only stone carving, hewing as opposed to modelling — an entirely different sensibility from Rodin or Constantin Brancusi’s bronzes, which also put him in a retrograde position relative to contemporary critical practice and discourse. Lipchitz specifically recorded Modigliani’s anti-Rodin stance. The act of carving was, however, too arduous for him ultimately, and he relinquished the pursuit due to ill health prior to his artistic maturity. Nonetheless, it is impossible to fully appreciate his painting without acknowledging his disappointment in not becoming a sculptor and the connotations of venerability which remain until the very end. Painting was perhaps even to the end of his life secondary in his mind to sculpture. The abandonment of sculpture accelerated his development as a painter and encouraged him to explore three-dimensional space and develop spatial distortions in the paintings, something more quickly discovered in stone. In the permanent immobility of stone, with no gesture beyond the block, occupying real space must also have been a comfort

HEAD Washington, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. Limestone, 49.5 x 18.4 x 22.8 cm, c. 1911—12

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 14

07.07.21 14:33

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 15

07.07.21 14:33

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 16

07.07.21 14:33

FIG. 2

Head, London, Tate. Limestone,

89.2 x 14 x 35.2 cm, c. 1911—12

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 23

07.07.21 14:33

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 24

07.07.21 14:33

FIRST MATURE PAINTINGS

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 25

07.07.21 14:33

5. LOLA DE VALENCE This painting interprets as well as any Modigliani produced the Parisian nightlife he experienced first-hand. It is an act of extrovert ed, socially engaged public painting more often seen in his spontaneous pencil drawings, the dessins à boire he made in exchange for drinks in Parisian bars, which are not scrupulously descriptive or boisterous caricatures but refined and dignified classicising heads. The title of the work as indicated by the inscription refers to a popular Spanish dancer of the previous century portrayed by Édouard Manet in 1862 (Musée d’Orsay) but does so here enigmatically as she is unrecognisable as this particular character, not least because the actual sitter, Lola Melea, had black hair. Modigliani’s intentions are open to speculation. Charles Baudelaire had celebrated this very Lola de Valence in a poem, ‘Fleurs du Mal’, which more likely inspired Modigliani’s than Manet’s canvas. His picture is not commemorative of that celebrity, so presumably he was painting a notion not a narrative, making a statement about exotic sensuality in the same intense, uneasy manner of Baudelaire’s writing. It was an unusual gesture in his corpus to reference recent art history and literature so openly and is therefore a particular type in his oeuvre. He was depicting a character, not a person in the same room, as became his preferred method, so he approached the likeness differently, more broadly expressive in a direction that would not be sustained in his work. Modigliani’s painting in Copenhagen of the pantomime character Pierrot — the clown — of the same date, style and cardboard support provides another exception from this time. At first glance, these subjects seem unmodern, reminding one of Marina Tsvetaeva’s sarcastic comment to Anna Akhmatova that it was brave to reference characters like Pierrot during the years of the Second World War.13 The picture relates literally to the stone sculptures Modigliani had produced earlier, signalling that the sculptures he could no longer physically make conditioned his attitude towards painting, as they would for the rest of his life. Portrayed in sharp profile, Lola is treated like a painted version of one of the sculptures, nostalgic as the artist was now for that medium. The head is represented as a

LOLA DE VALENCE New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cardboard, 52.1 x 33.7 cm, c. 1915

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 26

07.07.21 14:33

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 27

07.07.21 14:33

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

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 28

07.07.21 14:33

LATER PORTRAITS OF WOMEN

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 67

07.07.21 14:34

Modigliani_layout final_07072021.indd 68

07.07.21 14:34

(1884–1920), the time has come to re-examine the artist’s controversial place in Modernist art history. By examining a select group of outstanding originals, this recent study celebrates his best work through advances in our understanding of the painter’s techniques. This focused analysis of the artist, which centers on his maturity as a sculptor and painter, includes character-

DAVID FRANKLIN

A hundred years after the death of Amedeo Modigliani

DAVID FRANKLIN

istic examples across Modigliani’s major genres, espe-

Anhand einer ausgewählten Gruppe herausragender Werke feiert diese neue Studie das Œuvre des Künstlers und gewährt tiefe Einblicke in seine Technik. Die fokussierte Analyse, die sich auf Modiglianis Ent wicklung als Bildhauer und Maler konzentriert, umfasst charakteristische Beispiele aus seinen Hauptgenres —

978 -3- 89790 - 629-7

9 783897 906297

Modigliani Cover_07072021.indd 1

arnoldsche

insbesondere Porträts und weibliche Akte.

arnoldsche

Kunstgeschichte der Moderne erneut zu untersuchen.

BETWEEN RENAISSANCE AND MODERNISM

Tod ist es an der Zeit, den kontroversen Maler in der

MODIGLIANI

Hundert Jahre nach Amedeo Modiglianis (1884–1920)

MODIGLIANI

cially portraiture and female nudes.

07.07.21 14:45