Modigliani: Beyond the Myth
is at the AGO until January 23, 2005

By Alidë Kohlhaas

In the early days of my initiation into serious painting, Amedeo Clemente Modigliani counted among the important artists to study from the period when Paris was the toast of art. Then, sometime after the mid-1960s, he vanished from the horizon of art influence. Perhaps this came about because figure painting became passé. For whatever reasons, this lack of attention really was a loss to the education of young artists on the one side, and on the other, to the public, who only got to see the odd portion of some of his works that had become a cliché—the elongated faces of some of the women he painted.

Now the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is home to a very exciting and revealing exhibition, Modigliani: Beyond the Myth. The myth, of course, is woven around the man's bohemian lifestyle, his heavy drinking, the taking of drugs, the early death from tuberculosis, and the dramatic suicide of his highly pregnant last companion only days after he died. Since Modigliani made only a bare living from his works, and his daily struggle to survive as a stranger in Paris made good copy, young artists of later generations took him as a lifestyle role model. The myth had been born that true artists had to suffer, and live in squalid surroundings.

Lunia Czechowska (Woman with Fan) 1919
Musée d'Art de la Ville de Paris

Unfortunately, these were the wrong aspect of this complicated man that many artists have since attempted to imitate. Until recently, no-one really looked at the large body of work Modigliani produced, at the influences that other art forms had on him that gave his works a defining personality and quality. The present exhibit leaves no doubt what influenced this, today, underrated artist. One can only hope that it will lead to a greater appreciation of his tremendous ability, vision, and output of paintings, drawings and sculptures. One can almost say that the latter really was his first love, but ill health, from early childhood on, made it difficult for him to work with marble and stone.

The exhibition offers a taste of all of his different forms of artistic endeavors. What becomes more and more apparent as one wanders through the show is that not only his Italian background shaped his work, but African masks, Egyptian art, and even Japanese art, had influenced how he represented the human face and figure in whatever medium he chose—or could afford at any given time—to express himself. What is also important is that as one looks at the faces with their often empty eyes, that those eyes are not really so empty, but speak volumes through the way he placed them in the face, the way he shaded them and the way he colored them, sometimes of different color—one dark, one light. What also becomes clear is that those empty eyes echo the masks of various exotic cultures he studied during his wanderings through Paris's museums.

The handful of limestone sculptures in the show has much in common with Egyptian or Nubian stonework. As do some of his drawings on display. His Woman in Profile, a line drawing of great quality, captures the Nubian head to perfection, whether consciously or subconsciously, one cannot say.

I have always admired Modigliani's work, and this exhibition has deepened that admiration. Having gone his own way, following no style or fashion in the art of his time, this artist created images that, although abstracted in that most of the faces and bodies are elongated in an unnatural manner, they contain more life than many a realistic portrait. He used colors in ways that make the flesh breathe. Sometimes his approach can almost be called the caricaturing of the individuals he painted, yet he revealed the sitters' nature far more than had he stuck to anatomical correctness. One just needs to view his painting of the poet, novelist, designer and filmmaker, Jean Cocteau*. Though a prolific artist even in his early years (he outlived Modigliani by 43 years although he was only five years younger), Cocteau had a reputation as a dandy even in his early days. Modigliani's painting captured this side of the artist, including his intellectual arrogance, and one can see why the subject hated it for many years. Apparently, however, he grew to like it in later years.

Modigliani's portrait of Elena Povolozky seems almost an anomaly among his portraits, for here he captured the Slavic round face of his subject and made no attempt to introduce exoticism into the work. He did, however, paint into her downcast blue eyes a deep sadness. Perhaps this foreign-born Parisian resident was an exoticism in her own right to the Italian Modigliani, and his circle consisting of local and émigré artists.

Speaking of émigrés, the exhibition makes much of Modigliani's outsider status, including that of being Jewish in the Paris of the first two decades of the 20^th century. Having been raised in a very liberal household by his liberally educated mother, one doubts that the latter had that much influence on him, although he painted many of his fellow religionists, whose portraits are part of the show. But, one can read into his lifestyle and his approach to his art so many things, depending on which side one stands, and from what angle one looks at him. His search for a specifically personal style came probably far more from his constant illnesses, which hampered him from age 10 onward. He also had a need to push aside the apparent provincialism he felt so strongly present in his native Leghorn (Livorno), a small seaport south of Pisa, which once was a free port and had many foreign residents. Today it has about 200,000 inhabitants, but during Modigliani's time was even smaller, though cosmopolitan in make up.

Two works from 1918—the sweet-natured, almost submissive, but not servile expression in the painting entitled Servant Girl, and his A Little Peasant, where he captured the innocence of the young boy—speak highly of how Modigliani was able to bring to life on canvas his subjects without sacrificing his personal approach.

There is an excellent painting of Lunia Czechowska (Woman with a Fan) from 1919. Since they first met in 1916, she became one of his favorite models, although they were soul mates, not lovers. His lovers, of course, also ended up on numerous canvases. One of these was the South African-born writer, Beatrice Hastings, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship during 1914-15 that, nevertheless, led to some remarkable portraits and drawings. His next known affair is with Simone Thiroux, who like him suffered from tuberculosis since early childhood. He painted multiple portraits of her, but broke off the affair when she told him she is pregnant. He denied paternity to a boy born in 1917.

His last lover was 19-year-old Jeanne Hébuterne, a student at the Académie Colarossi and the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs. This middle class young woman, although reserved, had a strong personality. Friends placed much hope on her to influence him to lead a less chaotic life. Without a doubt, during their life together, his art became clearer and more serene, but he did not alter his lifestyle. As a consequence, his health continued to deteriorate.

Jeanne bore him a daughter, also called Jeanne, in November 1918. Modigliani, aware of his obligations to mother and child, painted a great deal—at the time they lived in Nice—including the only four landscapes known of in his body of work, aside from Small Tuscan Road, which he painted in 1898 at age 14. It stands out as a curiosity among all of his figurative works shown in the current exhibit of about 80 works from collections around the globe.

The reason for stating so many details of his love life, is that Modigliani never painted any of his lovers in then nude. He reserved that for professional models or friends. Yet, it was his nudes that brought him a modicum of fame, or infamy. December 17, 1917 was the opening of his only one-man show. Berthe Weill, a courageous woman, who constantly struggled against the sexism of her time to run her gallery, gave just about every well-known early 20^th century artist a start, including Picasso and the Mexican, Rivera.

Weill chose to make Modigliani's lush nudes the focal point of the exhibition, which turned out to be its downfall. To gain attention, she placed one in the gallery's window, oblivious to the fact that on the opposite side of the street stood a police station. The commissioner of police gave her the choice of taking the nudes off the walls or have them seized. It seems, among other things, he did not like that they showed pubic hair. While this closed down the exhibition temporarily, it brought some fame to the artist and the gallery, resulting in the sale of works.

Nude with Coral Necklace, 1917
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio

The irony, of course, is that Modigliani posed many of his models in the manner of Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), the great 16^th century painter, such as this great Renaissance painter' Sleeping Venus. Modigliani was not the only one to paint variations of works by previous artists. All through history this has happened, and the Impressionists were particularly inclined to do so. But, outwardly, French social mores could not allow such open display of female pulchritude. Never mind that underneath all that never-changing petit bourgeois behavior something quite differently went on, and still does . . .

The AGO is the only Canadian venue of the exhibition, which began its life at the Jewish Museum in New York. It will move to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., where it will be on view from February 26 to May 29, 2005
*Jean Cocteau, 1916-17, The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation Inc.

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