Meryle Secrest Read online

  Zadkine explained that an alley that no longer exists (this comment was made in 1930) led into the back garden of 216. In those days two or three artists’ studios were lined up against a wall. There was a piece of open ground behind them, and overhead a few trees threw their black branches protectively over the vulnerable glass roofs.

  Ossip Zadkine posing with his work, 1929 (image credit 9.2)

  “Modigliani’s studio was a glass box. As I approached I saw him lying on a tiny bed. His fine velvet suit floated forlornly in a wild but frozen sea and waited for him to awaken.” All around the walls Modigliani had pinned up dozens of drawings, “like so many white horses in a movie frame of a stormy sea that has been stopped for an instant,” Zadkine continued. The drawings also fascinated him; a breeze coming through an open window stirred the large white sheets of paper, which were attached by a single pin, and “one would have thought wings were beating over the sprawled painter,” so still and silent that he looked as if he had drowned.

  Once aroused Modigliani showed Zadkine his perfectly oval stone heads, “on the side of which the nose jutted out like an arrow towards the mouth.” Such a lifestyle would not have surprised the visitor, who was also living in similarly uncomfortable quarters. They were so cramped that the wonder was, Zadkine’s friends said, that between his sculptures and an enormous Great Dane, there was any room left for him. “Zadkine, at this period, wore a Russian smock and had his hair cut à la Russe and fringed over the forehead, which gave him a startling resemblance to his own images in wood.” Zadkine understood Modigliani better than most and knew he would never explain what he was doing. “His only response to my comments as a professional sculptor was a pleased laugh which echoed through the shadows of the lean-to he used for an outside studio.”

  They were united in all the ways they had invented of managing to eat without paying, “because he quickly blew the money that came from Livorno and I myself, by the twentieth of each month, had spent the advance my father sent me from Smolensk.” By common consent they would walk to the corner of the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail, the center of life in Montparnasse, otherwise known as the Carrefour Vavin, and sit down at a café terrace. There they would patiently wait “like fishermen, for an old friend to rescue us with a loan of three francs so we could eat at Rosalie’s.” If not they went to Rosalie’s anyway, endured her lectures, and perhaps Modigliani forced another drawing on her that ended up in the cellar.

  Several reasons have been given for Modigliani’s eventual decision to return to painting. It is said that the dust from stonecutting was too damaging for his lungs and the work too arduous; both are plausible. It is also thought he was convinced of the relative ease of selling an easel painting compared to whatever he might create in stone, which was much more likely to be misunderstood, took longer to make, and cost more. This is probably also true. One wonders if there was a further reason. In terms of exhibiting his sculptures, Modigliani’s big opportunity came the year before, when seven heads went on view in the Cubist gallery at the Salon d’Automne exhibition of 1912. A photograph of the room in which they were shown was published in L’Illustration and two thumbnail pictures of his heads in Commoedia Illustré (Paris). That was a great piece of luck but in other ways his work was being passed over by bigger shows, that year of 1912, in London, Cologne, and Munich, displaying the latest movements in art. Then an even greater opportunity presented itself. Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn, two American artists, were planning an ambitious international exhibition in New York, traveling widely in Europe in 1912 looking for established and rising talents to exhibit at the 69th Regiment Armory the following year. A crowd of four thousand people attended the opening night of the exhibition, technically the International Exhibition of Modern Art, February–March 1913, soon known as the Armory Show and a historic event: the introduction of modern art in America. There were over one thousand paintings, sculptures, and examples of decorative arts, both American and European. The European painting schools, Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Fauvist, Cubist, and Symbolist, were particularly well represented. There were Cézanne and Matisse, Picasso, Braque and Léger, Redon and Seurat, van Gogh and Gauguin, Kandinsky, Picabia, Dufy, Derain,…The list went on and on. Nobody had seen anything like it, and comments, criticisms, and caricatures filled the newspapers for months. “Art students burned … Matisse in effigy, violent episodes occurred in the schools,” and when the show moved to Chicago, it was investigated by the Vice Commission “upon the complaint of an outraged guardian of morals.”

  There was no doubt in the daring, ability, and freedom to reinvent, and the years 1910–1913 “were the heroic period in which the most astonishing innovations had occurred; it was then that the basic types of the art of the next forty years were created,” the art historian Meyer Schapiro wrote in Modern Art. “About 1913 painters, writers, musicians and architects felt themselves to be at an epochal turning-point corresponding to an equally decisive transition in philosophical thought … The world of art had never known so keen an appetite for action, a kind of militancy that gave to cultural life the quality of a revolutionary movement or the beginnings of a new religion.”

  Compared to the enormous range of paintings shown—Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase was another work singled out for praise or derision—European sculpture was relatively poorly represented. There were works by Rodin. Alexander Archipenko, three years younger than Modigliani, was invited and showed a cement torso, Salomé, 1910. Constantin Brancusi, eight years Modigliani’s senior, was beginning to become known and the year before had sold his first work to an American collector, Agnes Meyer. This “arch-modern,” as Schapiro called him, showed five works. Among them was the stylized head of a woman, resting on one ear, called Sleeping Muse. Another was a highly abstracted bust, Mademoiselle de Pologany, in white marble. This particular work was compared to “a hard-boiled egg balanced on a cube of sugar,” and his works caused almost as much of a furor as Duchamp’s descending nude. But when Brancusi’s work was shown that same year in the Salon of the Allied Artists Association in London, the critic Roger Fry wrote that the sculptors were “the most remarkable in the show.” Brancusi was on his way.

  Modigliani, by contrast, had not been invited. Unlike other artists he had as yet no dealer and there were no Modigliani heads on view in shop windows. True, but Brancusi had been his mentor, and a close friend. In 1912–13 he was storing one of Modigliani’s heads in his studio, as we know from the latter’s letter to Paul Alexandre. Did he put in a word for his friend? Did he even try? Zadkine said, “Little by little the sculptor in Modigliani was dying.”

  Some time afterward Zadkine, visiting the boulevard Raspail studio, was saddened to see abandoned stone heads, “outside, unfinished, bathing in the dirt of a Parisian courtyard and merging with the glorious dust … A large stone statue, the only one he had carved, lay with its face and belly towards the grey sky.” Of the wreckage left behind of Modigliani’s dreams of being a sculptor, some twenty-seven works have survived. Seventeen are in museums, among them the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, Philadelphia Museum, and the Tate and the National Gallery of Art in London. The remaining ten are privately owned. In June 2010, one of these, a sculpted stone head owned by Gaston Lévy, a French businessman, sold at Christie’s in London for $52.8 million (see color illustration).

  There is in the corridor

  A man who wishes me dead

  —MODIGLIANI

  Picasso on the Place Ravignan, 1904 (image credit 9.3)

  Although Cubism, the most important new movement in art just then, would determine much of the painting and sculpture in the future, its main proponents, Picasso and Braque, were poorly represented at the Armory Show. This was not as crucial for Picasso as it had been for Modigliani. He was already on his way critically and financially and, in 1912, was living in his smart new apartment with a new lover, Eva. Fernande O
livier, who had been Picasso’s mistress when Modigliani arrived in Montmartre, met Modigliani at one of the cheap restaurants where they could all eat for ninety centimes on credit, and that would include a small glass of something to finish the meal, “often poured by the patron himself.” In those early days Modigliani “was young and strong and you couldn’t take your eyes off his beautiful Roman head with its absolutely perfect features,” she wrote. “At that time he was living … in one of the studios on the bank of the gloomy old reservoir. This was before his vie maudite in Montparnasse, and, despite reports to the contrary, Picasso liked him a lot. How could any of us have failed to be captivated by an artist who was so charming and so kind and generous in all his dealings with his friends?”

  The establishment of artists’ suppliers, Lucien Lefebvre-Foinet on the rue Vavin (image credit 9.4)

  It was easy to be friendly in the old days when everyone was poor and unknown, drinking cheap wine together, indulging in hashish, and railing against the ignorance of dealers. It was something else when someone like Picasso shot to prominence; Modigliani could not help measuring his efforts against those of the clever Spaniard and finding them wanting. Modigliani also believed Picasso was decades ahead of the rest of them. He was so imaginative, so creative, and so successful. But he was tricky, almost impossible to know, and his reputation for ironic comment, already far advanced, contained a certain cruel humor. One never knew whether it would be turned on one personally. On the other hand he was a natural leader around whom others congregated. He just seemed to know. It was useful to be somewhere on the fringe if only because Picasso’s hospitality was legendary and there would always be a bowl of macaroni for the visitor or even a cutlet. If nothing else. But there was more.

  Modigliani resolutely refused to follow Picasso and Braque into Cubism, but there was no doubt he was very much influenced by Picasso’s work and, as the comment suggests, measured his own efforts against it. Pierre Daix, an authority on Picasso, believes Modigliani witnessed the transformation the former’s work underwent in his Portrait of Gertrude Stein, painted just after they met. The original work underwent a radical revision. Picasso “reduces her face to a mask, to contrasts of volume lacking any detail of either identification or psychological expression. That summer, anticipating Matisse, Picasso was the first to take amplification and formal purification to such an extreme. And the faces of all his figure-paintings of the period display a similar reduction to essentials, to structure. Was this what struck Modigliani?”

  Daix suggests that in subsequent paintings, particularly Woman’s Head with Beauty Spot, La Petite Jeanne, and The Amazon, Modigliani is experimenting with a similar masklike stylization and geometrical emphasis. The two men certainly had parallel interests, not just their fascination with Negro art. Picasso painted his large canvas Family of Saltimbanques in 1905 which Daix believes Modigliani must have seen since it was in his studio for the next three years. In due course Modigliani had portrayed himself similarly, as a traveling player, using the identical palette that Picasso had used: blue-greens, shades of brown, and oranges. That was in 1915, and by coincidence or design, Modigliani painted a portrait of Picasso that same year. It is a curious picture. The paint is almost scrawled across the canvas in a furious fashion, unlike Modigliani’s carefully developing style. The subject’s penetrating stare is masked, the mouth is small and set, and the expression is secretive, almost cunning. The word “savoir,” knowledge, learning, or “to know” has been appended. Restellini suggests that this perhaps refers to Maud Dale’s belief in Picasso as a visionary. Was that really meant as a compliment or, as Billy Klüver believed, “an ironic comment about the guy who knows it all?” If Modigliani wanted to remain true to his own vision he would have to, and did, keep a safe psychological distance from this powerful, perhaps even artistically stultifying personality. When asked to what “ism” he belonged and in what manner he painted, he would always reply, “Modigliani.” But for an artist to keep his ideas, even his techniques, a secret was well understood. Everyone went to buy paints and equipment from Lefebvre-Foinet, a family of chemists and artists’ suppliers in business since 1872, partly because of their astute awareness that their role was akin to the confessional. Every artist wanted to learn secrets about pigments and techniques that would give him or her an advantage over the rest. So if an artist arrived to consult Lefebvre-Foinet, usually in the lunch hour when everyone else was eating, and if by chance someone else arrived, Lefebvre-Foinet had provided a discreet exit so that the two would never meet.

  There was rivalry but also antagonism to at least some degree. It seems likely that Modigliani, ever alert to signs of anti-Semitism, had overheard a certain unkind remark from Picasso. It is claimed—the author is not cited—that in the days when Picasso was poor and Modigliani briefly had some money, Modigliani saw the former passing by his café table, sized up the situation, and offered a loan of five francs. Picasso took the money gratefully. In due course, the situation being reversed, Picasso called on Modigliani one day to return the favor. He presented him with a one-hundred-franc bill. As Picasso was leaving Modigliani remarked that he owed him some change but would not give him any, because “I have to remember I’m a Jew.”

  Another story concerns one evening in 1917. Picasso, unable to sleep, decided to paint something. Looking through his collection for a fresh piece of canvas, and finding none, he decided to use a painting acquired from Modigliani. He could have chosen to paint on the reverse, which was an almost universal solution. But that had a certain symbolism Picasso would have automatically rejected. Instead, he painted a still life of his own on top: a guitar, a bottle of port, some sheet music, a glass, and some rope. He evidently felt the urge to obliterate the work of someone with whom he was, obscurely or otherwise, in competition.

  A further incident bears out this possibility. At the end of World War II, the art historian Kenneth Clark was lunching with a mutual friend in Paris; Picasso was one of the guests. Lord Clark had brought, as a gift for his hostess, the first book ever published on the sculpture of his great friend Henry Moore. “Picasso seized on it in a mood of derision,” Clark wrote. “At first he was satisfied: ‘C’est bien. Il fait le Picasso. C’est très bien.’…But after a few pages he became much worried.” Picasso left the table and took the book over to a far corner of the room. For the rest of the meal, he sat there turning the pages in silence, “like an old monkey that had got hold of a tin he can’t open.”

  In the years to come Henri Cartier-Bresson took a photograph of Picasso’s studio on the rue des Grands Augustins in Paris. By then—it was 1942—Modigliani’s work had become well known. The picture shows one of Modigliani’s paintings, a young girl with brown hair, propped beside the great man’s canvases and sculptures.

  Fernande Olivier’s reference to Modigliani’s move to Montparnasse as the start of his “vie maudite” (cursed life) reflects a view that, over the decades, has hardened into a certainty. It is axiomatic that Modigliani was a brilliant young artist who ruined his health and died prematurely from drugs and drink. As has been noted, even authors who are aware that he had tuberculosis take the same similarly dismissive attitude. The addiction showed the extent of his self-destructiveness. We judge from the context of our own age, when tuberculosis is curable, rather than from his, when it was not; that dread disease has faded into the background reserved for forgotten scourges like leprosy and the Black Death.

  This version is based on a tragic misconception, but it is, unfortunately, one that Modigliani deliberately cultivated. A key to this is contained in his mother’s diary, written four years after his death, in 1924. Reading between the lines, she provides the clue. Dedo did not want anyone to know—she used the verb “to flaunt, show off, make a point of”—the terrible shadow under which he was living. Only his closest friends knew he had tuberculosis, for the reason that, if such a fact had been known, he would have been avoided, if not shunned by everyone. He had to pretend. Nothing had c
hanged since the days when Chopin’s and Keats’s landlords had burned the furniture after they moved out. If anything, matters had grown worse because, in 1882, Robert Koch famously demonstrated that tuberculosis was a bacillus and easily transmissible. This medical discovery coincided with the fact that, by 1900, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in France. In the 1890s the French government mounted what was called a “War on Tuberculosis,” and an international congress was held in Paris in 1905, just before Modigliani arrived, to look for a cure. David S. Barnes, author of an invaluable study of tuberculosis in nineteenth-century France, wrote, “Around 1900 tuberculosis was a national scourge, highly contagious, lurking around every corner and symptomatic of moral decay.”

  Ordinary people were naturally terrified, often irrationally. Barnes tells the story of a maid who developed bronchitis, so alarming her employers that she was moved out of the house and into lodgings. When she then developed unmistakable signs of tuberculosis she was fired. “Fleeing to the countryside, where her prospects of recovery might have been greater, she sought refuge with her sister. There were young children in the household, however, and the sister refused to have her. The young woman’s last resort was the hospital, but even there, the doors were closed to her, because all of the beds were full.” Studies soon demonstrated the obvious: that the poorest areas of Paris had the worst infections. When an outbreak of bubonic plague occurred in one of those areas, called “îlots insalubres” (unsanitary blocks), the offending buildings around the rue Championnet in the seventeenth arrondissement were demolished. Voices were soon raised demanding that all the îlots insalubres be torn down. Weekly disinfection of buildings where there was an outbreak was mandatory. Voices were raised requiring doctors to identify tubercular patients so that they could be isolated. Everyone else’s health was at risk.