Meryle Secrest Read online

  To put every clean person in a pigsty

  And to annoy and upset my neighbor

  And set light to his hayloft

  So that his little son suffocates.

  Unsure of her mother’s love, Margherita turned in two directions. She was a dutiful daughter, contributing to the family income, caring for Dedo’s orphan, and there to help when her parents became ill and died. But a sense of not being valued also led to a prickly readiness to find herself offended, the “Why me?” lash of her mother’s poem. The family expectation seemed to be of automatic achievement. Failure led to recriminations and a willingness to wound. Ridicule was common and even Mené, the born diplomat, occasionally indulged: “Tell that thing who created us,” he wrote, only half joking, “that if she decides to get upset every time things heat up … I will let a few days go by without writing.” It was time to draw attention to his mother’s rather prominent moustache. It reminded Mené of a wolf that had lost its fur or a leopard that had changed its spots; even when he was trying, true invective was beyond Mené. Then he added the one thing that really was wounding. Their mother was always talking about how brave she was, when she was not brave at all.

  A school play. Modigliani, hatted, is in the back row, second from the right. (image credit 3.7)

  Sometime around 1895 while Mené was still doing his military service, Dedo, then perhaps eleven, wrote to tell him about their mother’s triumph; her Children’s Theatre had won an award. Mené was ecstatic. How he wished he could have been at the Strozzi Theatre at that moment. In his mind’s eye he saw

  the white curtain falling, the drop curtain opening, and our mother appearing there and not leaving (because in the confusion she can’t figure out how to get off the stage)…Mamma must have been wearing something black and perhaps a little bow on her left side (it’s her passion!) and her face must have been very rosy … almost like Piticche [his name for Margaret] on a beautiful day … A simple bow of her head to this side and that—and inside, inside the laugh mother always has when she receives sincere compliments that make her blush and make her happy. And then she stops talking, straightens up and her eyes shine … and the handkerchief in her hand is not just for blowing her nose.

  When Mené went to the University of Pisa to study for his law degree he was a monarchist, but by the time he left he had joined the newly formed Socialist Party and the well-being of workers had become a lifelong concern; he was elected a consigliere, or councilman, in Livorno when he was twenty-three. His change of heart was prompted by an awareness of the extent to which the Modigliani family, his father included, had grown rich by exploiting workers in their Sardinian mines. Now he was reaching across class barriers and his life would be devoted to liberal causes, his belief in the dignity of manual labor and votes for women, while his political stance was anticolonialist, pacifist, and dedicated to change from within. Mené imagined the middle-class audience gathered at their mother’s moment of triumph and the polite applause that would have greeted her because she was a wealthy lady who had been forced to work. The fact that they would have pitied her exasperated him. “Too much condescension from idiots!”

  During the past year Mené had become aware of how much their parents had gained in a human sense from being obliged to work. “Think about this Dedo,” he wrote. “You must love your parents just because they are your parents. But … you must love them much, much more because they work for you! How many times I have felt like a stranger when I was with workers!” Now he is proud to say, “I am the son of workers, too.”

  The fact that his parents worked was something Dedo, too, should be proud of, not ashamed of. Dedo must do whatever he could to make sure that future workers were valued and never forget that he, too, was the son of workers.

  Mené was aware, as his letters to Piticche imply, that she, along with most other members of his family, did not share his Socialist views. Some of them would, he wrote, say he was a windbag and would scream at him for saying they were workers too. However much they might quibble with his ideas, when Mené was in trouble he could be sure his family would unite behind him. In 1898 Mené, then twenty-six years old, became editor of a progressive weekly paper in Piacenza at a time when the increased price of bread was causing rioting in the streets. When all of Tuscany was under martial law, everyone was under suspicion, and especially editors of radical papers sure to be fomenting unrest. On May 4, 1898, Giuseppe Emanuele was arrested and went to prison in chains.

  A portrait made in 1900 of Modigliani’s oldest brother, Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani (image credit 3.8)

  “We don’t know why he is there or what he is accused of,” Eugénie wrote at the end of June. It was true Mené was an active and militant Socialist, but this was hardly a crime. “My poor darling, he endures with simplicity and real heroism, something that must be doubly difficult, given his youth and expansive temperament … He consoles himself like a Benedictine monk in his cloister, with faith—faith in a very pure and elevated ideal—perhaps too beautiful and unrealistic—but since Mené is not only good but furiously reasonable, I am sure he will find inside himself the way to reconcile his dream with reality.”

  Not only good, but furiously reasonable—the evaluation was astute and to the point. In years to come this voluble, optimistic, and self-deprecating politician with a gift for conciliation would become a Socialist deputy and one of the most influential members of his party. But for the moment he was helpless. On July 14, 1898, he was sentenced to six months in prison plus a heavy fine. There were hints of worse to come.

  The effect on his family of Mené’s arrest, imprisonment, and sentencing cannot be overemphasized. Eugénie’s diary makes it clear that of all the blows of fate she had endured, this was the worst. The day of Mené’s sentencing she wrote, “The most agonizing day of my life. Today, judgement will be passed on Emanuele in Florence before a military tribunal. I am mad with fear and nervous prostration.” As with all family crises, everyone was arriving. Umberto, in Liège, was cutting short his studies to return home. Laure, who had been in Marseille for two years, was on her way back. Gabrielle was running the household and Amédée, ever generous, was offering to pay Mené’s fine. They all felt with Mené, agonized with Mené, and closed ranks for Mené. The fate of this brilliant young lawyer, already de facto head of the family, affected not just their financial and emotional security but almost their very existence. Eugénie did not collapse, but she suffered. Dedo, her closest and best, with his dawning awareness of the issues at stake, was just as frightened. A month later, in August 1898, he had another serious illness. This time it was typhoid.

  It happened just after Laure returned. Dedo had been feeling listless, with headaches, no appetite, and an inability to sleep, but when he suddenly began running a fever the whole household knew what it meant. This was a fever that returned day after day for weeks on end, gradually climbing to a high of 103–104°F. Such a patient is restless, hot, and uncomfortable, his cheeks flushed and his stomach sore. At the climax of his infection there will be great numbers of typhoid bacilli in the blood, and a characteristic skin rash, called “rose spots,” pale pink or rose in color, will appear on his stomach, chest, and back. But the worst damage will be to his intestines, where bacilli attack the body, leaving areas of dead tissue and ulcers. Massive hemorrhaging into the bowel is a real possibility. Further complications are acute inflammation of the gallbladder, pneumonia, encephalitis, and heart failure.

  Was Dedo hospitalized? There is no evidence one way or another. But since his recovery would have depended entirely on the quality of the nursing care, the odds are that he stayed at home where Eugénie, Gabrielle, Laure, and Margherita could take turns nursing him. He was hovering between life and death and delirious for more than a month. Then comes an episode that has been discounted as part of the Modigliani “myth.” In a memoir she dictated to her daughter in 1924 Eugénie writes that, at the height of his delirium, “Dedo said he wanted to study painting. He had
never before spoken of this and probably believed it was an impossible dream that could never be realized.”

  He had seen few actual paintings but plenty of reproductions of Italian Renaissance works. “He spoke of one of his nightmares: he missed the train that was supposed to take him to Florence to visit the Uffizi Gallery. He spoke of Segantini, the most popular painter of the day, with such insistence that his mother, who was nursing him, decided she had to satisfy him whatever it cost. One day when he was still in the grip of fever and delirium, she clasped both his hands and tried to hold his attention. She made him this solemn promise: ‘When you are cured, I shall get you a drawing master.’ ”

  This sounds like a fallible recollection made thirty years after the event. (The memoir was published in The Unknown Modigliani by Noël Alexandre in 1994.) Obviously, everyone already knew of Dedo’s interest in art. And Eugénie’s diary of July 1898 makes it clear that Dedo was starting drawing lessons on August 1, 1898. She further notes that he already saw himself as a painter. It is likely that lessons had begun, as Pierre Sichel believed, just before Dedo was taken ill. The essential facts, however, cannot be in doubt; the dream in which you have just missed a train, and an opportunity has passed you by, is too human not to be believed.

  What seems likely is that Dedo had never talked so openly, and for the first time revealed his passionate longing to see the actual masterpieces rather than poor reproductions. That fateful year Eugénie had also written that she had been reluctant to give Dedo too much encouragement for fear that (like Gabrielle) “he will neglect his studies to pursue a shadow.” This latest illness had obviously changed her mind and put the emphasis where it belonged, on his present happiness. Eugénie’s account in 1924 ends, “The sick boy understood—confusedly—and from that moment began to get better.”

  Emanuele was released from prison in December of that year. It was four months after Dedo’s illness. At that moment, Dedo’s convalescence came to an end. He was back on his feet and ready to begin his life’s work.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Blood-Red Banner

  Nous nous sommes rencontrés dans un caveau maudit

  Au temps de notre jeunesse

  Fumant tous deux et mal vêtus attendant l’aube

  Épris épris des mêmes paroles dont il faudra changer le sens

  Trompés trompés pauvres petits…

  —GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE,

  “Poême lu au mariage d’André Salmon”

  ONE DAY in December 1898 the fourteen-year-old Dedo appeared as a new student in the studio of Guglielmo Micheli. The teacher, son of a printer, an orphan since the age of twelve, had worked his way out of poverty by unremitting effort and was given a grant to attend the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence. There he developed as a skilled but unexciting painter, but one with a natural gift for teaching and an ability to discover developing talent. Of the nine boys in Dedo’s class almost all became established artists. (There were no girls.)

  Micheli’s school consisted of a large room well lit by three north-facing windows on the ground floor of a villa in the via delle Siepi, Livorno, across from a shoemaker’s workshop. In keeping with its modest location Micheli’s school taught the basics in everything from painting, drawing, and sculpture to nude studies and landscapes. It was elementary training but, for its day, far more advanced than what a beginner would have received in an academy. Micheli’s master, Giovanni Fattori, was a prominent member of a group of artists working in Florence in the mid-nineteenth century, at a moment when Italy was struggling toward unification. Desperate times called for new horizons, in art as everywhere else. A group of artists had rejected the stale formulae of the academies and were dedicated to an art that would mirror the reality they saw around them. Like Robert Henri, founder of the Philadelphia Eight some decades later, another inspired teacher, Micheli and Fattori encouraged students to seek their inspiration in the contemporary scene. Fattori, who fought in the War of Independence of 1848–49, painted endless scenes of soldiers, whether camping or furiously engaged in battle, with a meticulous attention to detail and great delicacy of feeling, not just for his human subjects but their animals as well. Later, he turned to equally uncompromising studies of country life and was, when he died in 1908 at the age of eighty-three, one of the country’s most admired artists.

  Giovanni Fattori, no date (image credit 4.1)

  The Macchiaioli took their name from their manner of painting. They applied their colors in short brushstrokes and dots of paint; “macchia” means stain or blot, and these were the “makers of patches.” Like the French Impressionists who would follow them, they abandoned sterile studio studies for the outdoors, deliberately heightening the contrasts between light and shade. Adriano Cecioni, another prominent member of the group, recalled the almost religious fervor of their conversion to actual studies of real life. “ ‘Look, Banti, at the beauty of that white in the distance!’—‘Look, Signorini, the tone of the wheels against the white of the road!’—‘Look at the power of the vibrations of light!’ All it took was the sight of laundry hanging out to dry … to drive them into a frenzy.” But unlike the Impressionists the Macchiaioli took their cue from the muted, earth-toned palettes of Millet, Corot, and others of the Barbizon school. One of Fattori’s maxims was “Faites ce que vous sentez et n’aimez pas ce que font les autres” (“Do what you feel and don’t admire what others do”), which was not far removed from a subsequent injunction by Cocteau, “Ne t’attardes pas avec l’avant garde,” or “Don’t lag behind the avant garde.” This emphasis on originality was to have a lifelong significance for Modigliani.

  Fattori, by then in his seventies, was often in Micheli’s studio, taking a benevolent interest in student progress. On one of his visits “Dedo was doing a charcoal drawing on carta intelaiata, a still-life with drapery behind it; the technique of these drawings consisted in partly burning the paper and using the smoked parts as half-tints. Fattori saw the drawing and was very pleased with it,” Silvano Filippelli wrote. Modigliani’s classmates all had comments to make about him later. One described him as small and sickly looking, with a pale face and prominent, full red lips. Another called him “introverted and very shy. He would blush for no reason.” If, however, something made him angry—and his anger was unpredictable—he would start throwing whatever was handy, and he was hard to calm down.

  To others, he seemed owlishly old and knowledgeable—like them, had left the lycée to concentrate on art—spouting the poetry of Gabriele d’Annunzio and Charles Baudelaire, quoting from Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Prince Peter Kropotkin’s memoirs. That his elegant manners pointed to a good family was clear to them all. His classmate Renato Natali recalled that Dedo “belonged to a family that, to us, without a sou in our pockets, seemed rich but was probably only a little better off than we were.” The fluent comments in French, Italian, and English, the paintings and drawings by Dedo around the walls, the references to obscure writings—they were in awe. So when Dedo discussed Nietzsche’s theories about the death of God and the emergence of the Übermensch, and could quote from d’Annunzio’s latest novel, Le virgini delle Rocce (1896), he was “the Professor,” and “Superman.”

  Dedo seems to have spent little time in the studio, taking paint and canvas into the fields surrounding Livorno with one of his classmates, Manlio Martinelli. According to Renato Natali, he disliked painting the natural world intensely. The impression is rather borne out by an early painting of a wide road stretching into the horizon bordered by fields, popularly given to Modigliani, and with the speculative date of 1898. The execution is careful and listless, as if the artist wanted to make his feelings about the exercise completely clear. According to Natali, what Dedo wanted to do was “stroll through museums adoring his favorite Old Masters, the Sienese, for example,” referring to the artists of the Italian Renaissance. He added, “Amedeo hated the recent past.” This was not quite true, because Modigliani had already expressed his admirat
ion for Segantini (1858–1899), a painter of Alpine meadows, not to mention Fattori and the Pre-Raphaelites. But he was very selective.

  The work of the Post-Macchiaioli movement disintegrated into genre scenes, landscapes, portraits, and pseudo-Romantic costume histories; to John Russell it seemed “a peculiarly dead-end art” (1965). Despite the Italian trend to see Modigliani as the logical heir to a great movement, it seems impossible nowadays to find the remotest resemblance between the mature work of Modigliani and his tutelage under the guidance of Micheli and Fattori. As for student work, too little of that remains to make any conclusion possible.

  An exhibition in Venice in 2005, “Modigliani in Venice Between Leghorn and Paris,” is a case in point. It showed several works said to be from his earliest period. These were discovered by the art historian Christian Parisot, the result of his research into the history of the Modigliani family in Sardinia. Parisot also studied Tito Taci, a Tuscan businessman who opened a hotel and settled in Sardinia with his wife and children. He wrote that the Modigliani and Taci families were friends, which is the basis for his belief that, since Flaminio Modigliani continued to have business ties in Sardinia, he would have stayed at the Taci hotel and might have brought Dedo with him. Parisot ascribes a profile portrait of one of the Taci daughters, Norma Medea, to Modigliani.

  Parisot cites the canvas and supports as consistent with the period, along with the manner in which the paints are applied, some dates at lower left, a red hieroglyph, and a monogram with the letters AM on the front. Apparently the owners took the unusual step of cleaning the reverse and discovered a signature, “a. modigliani.” Questions remain, since signatures can be forged and no evidence is cited in the catalog by way of letters or photographs to prove Dedo ever visited Sardinia or, if he did, ever painted there.