“What I Am Searching For”
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
—WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
IN THOSE YEARS before the outbreak of World War I, Modigliani and his benefactor, Paul Alexandre, were in close contact, one that continued until the day in 1914 when the latter was mobilized by the French army and marched off to the front. The rue du Delta continued its happy, improvisational way of doing things, with another plate at the table for Modigliani, until the summer of 1913. That July the city of Paris reclaimed its ramshackle villa and Alexandre moved to a spacious nearby apartment at 10 Place Dancourt, next door to the Théâtre de Montmartre. This was furnished with the usual élan from whatever happened to be handy. The Moulin Rouge windmill was being demolished, so Alexandre bought a balustrade to install on what seems to have been a balcony, as a protection. He also acquired a small crystal chandelier. Things were obviously looking up at the new quarters, which had elegant high ceilings. Then Alexandre invited Modigliani to do the interior decoration. Modigliani said, “For it to be really good we need to accentuate the feeling of height.” Alexandre wrote, “And so we started to saw off the table legs and also lower the few miserable chairs we had. This gave it style. Whereas poor stylists minimize contrast, good stylists heighten contrast. Right up high, on a level with the chandelier, which we had also shortened, we hung Modigliani’s large red figures.” This tantalizing reference is to works that have never been brought to light. Alexandre concluded, “But we did not enjoy the place Dancourt for long.”
Modigliani’s studio at the Cité Falguière (image credit 8.1)
Although an habitué, Modigliani was not resident there either. His move to the Cité Falguière in the spring of 1909 had been at Brancusi’s suggestion and he was lucky enough to get a ground-floor studio, which staved off the drudgery of hauling blocks up and down stairs, and one with an outdoor patio. Foujita, who also lived there, said that the now-demolished building “had a wide entrance on the rue Falguière and you went through a court to a small door at the back which led to our studios. You had to cross a sort of bridge, like the approach to a medieval fortress, though the building was anything but fortress-like.” The studios were cheap and had plenty of light but like artists’ accommodations everywhere in Paris, impossible to heat. Warshawsky wrote of his own, “The building in which we were, of recent construction, was a flimsy affair of thin bricks and stucco, through which the dampness from outside penetrated, with the result that, despite the fact that the exterior temperature was nothing like so low as it would be in America, I actually suffered more intensely from the cold than I had ever done before.” They all knew where you went to spend every waking hour not devoted to work: to the cafés. And Montparnasse had two outstanding destinations, facing opposite each other at the corners of the boulevards de Montparnasse and Raspail: the Dôme and the Rotonde. The Dôme, much frequented by the Americans, was already open when Modigliani arrived. The Rotonde, opening in around 1910, was immediately adopted by Picasso, Diego Rivera, Ilya Ehrenburg, Marevna, Ortiz de Zárate, Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Léger, Kisling—in short, everyone who counted. Including Modigliani. “It was the last great expansion of the Parisian café, an enchanted place where, for the price of a cup of coffee, you could spend the day, demand free notepaper with pen and ink, and eat your way through baskets of free bread knobs,” Patrick Marnham wrote in his biography of Rivera. “Venir au café meant, according to Jean Moréas, to arrive at 8:00 a.m. for breakfast and to be there still at 5:00 a.m. on the following day.” The sculptor Chana Orloff recalled that they could spend hours in front of a single café crème, warming up.
The popular terrace of the Rotonde in 1919–20 (image credit 8.2)
The Cité Falguière was around the corner from the Gare Montparnasse and within walking distance of 242 boulevard Raspail, where Picasso, in the first flush of his success, had taken an elegant new apartment. Montmartre was no longer chic. The quartier had not yet become the tourist trap it is nowadays, ankle deep in artists selling themselves as portraitists and exhibiting amazingly identical styles, or shameless imitations of Utrillo’s cityscapes, or monkey-faced Mona Lisas and similar conceits. Tourists were not shuffling, shoulder to shoulder in dazed circles around the Place du Tertre hoping in vain for a place to sit down. But there were new faces in the cafés, the rents were going up, and pretty soon the cozy group of artists would not be able to find each other. So one went to the Rotonde to see and be seen.
At the bar of the Dôme, a group of regulars, among them three who helped “romanticize” the legend of Modigliani after his death. Far left, in profile, Francis Carco. In the foreground, Michel Georges-Michel, and standing, rear, with coat and scarf, André Salmon (image credit 8.3)
Newly fashionable it might be, but Montparnasse was hardly virgin territory. Those impeccable historians Klüver and Martin point out that painters and sculptors had been settling there since the early nineteenth century, when great open fields were full of vegetables for the Paris markets. In those days artists could take over workshops and convert them into studios, living comfortably in summer cottages. By 1890, nearly a third lived in Montparnasse, taking classes in the nearby ateliers of Bouguereau, Carolus-Duran, Gérôme, and others. After Picasso arrived in the summer of 1912 that settled the matter for everyone else. But Modigliani, with his usual prescience, was there first.
The center of Montparnasse, the Carrefour Vavin, the winter of 1905 (image credit 8.4)
“Carissimo,” Modigliani wrote to Paul Alexandre in May 1910, one of the many short notes now in the Alexandre archive, “The comet has not yet arrived…Terrible. I’ll definitely see you on Friday—after death of course.” Modigliani was referring to Halley’s Comet, named for the seventeenth-century British astronomer who had correctly predicted its return in 1759, 1835, and on May 18, 1910, the day Modigliani wrote.
Comets, small bodies of gases and dust, shooting across the heavens with streaming tails, had been known since ancient times, predicting, it was thought, catastrophe: famine, plague, or war. Thousands that day climbed up to the Butte Montmartre to get a better look at the once-in-a-lifetime event. In Italy, the pope ordered special prayers; in New York, “comet parties” took place in all the big hotels. In Paris the mood was less than superstitious but not euphoric. A newspaper columnist summed up the feeling the next day with the comment that the comet appeared on time but failed to explode and the end of the world was indefinitely postponed—mercifully unaware of how short that postponement would be. Still, 1910 was a strange year, full of signs and portents. By the time the comet arrived over Paris, where the Seine had flooded since time immemorial, the city had been inundated by the worst flood in 150 years. In January, four months earlier, the banks burst, the bridges threatened to collapse, and the water stood seventeen feet (five meters) deep in a train station along the quays, the future Musée d’Orsay. Looters emerged, the Métro and sewer systems were flooded, and boats and rats paddled along the boulevards, although the flood spared Montparnasse. A total of fifty thousand people were homeless and were fed in soup kitchens; no doubt Modigliani also took advantage of the free meals.
Paris under water after the great flood of 1910, contemporary postcard (image credit 8.5)
This was the year when the horse began to vanish from city streets, replaced by omnibuses and the demon motorcar. Traveling up in the air was an even newer idea, thanks to Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, whose airships were named in his honor. This option also seemed poised for mass acceptance even if two such huge and cumbersome Zeppelins crashed that summer. Then there was the undeniable fact that something strange was happening to women. Encouraged by the great couturier Paul Poiret, they were refusing to wear corsets. The female silhouette, once padded front and rear, was gently deflating like a balloon and women were daring to wear startling V-necks, bloomers, and all manner of similarly immodest garments. But the biggest revolution was in the skirt, which, after centuries of full-length concealment of the female leg, was starting to leave the floor. First, it coyly revealed an ankle. By the end of World War I it had soared to mid-calf and, as everyone knows, reached its apogee a decade later when it hit the knee. It all meant something—but what? Virginia Woolf wrote, “[I]n or about December 1910, the human character changed.” This was surely an overstatement, but the old ways were being swept aside and, along with them, the traditional limits placed on women of the kitchen and the bedroom. That, too, would have been disorienting.
In the art world, changes were equally rapid and arbitrary with consequences no one could foresee. Modigliani once told Louis Latourette untruthfully that, Picasso excepted, the only painter he admired was Rousseau. Modigliani was no doubt thinking of Rousseau’s painting The Wedding that made such an impression when he saw it with Alexandre.
No doubt he felt along with others who loved and shamelessly teased the Grand Old Man of art (he was then sixty-five) that there was something admirable about his childlike directness and his sweet belief that he and Picasso were the two greatest artists. And Modigliani would have shared Rousseau’s love of music. That artist played the violin and had a music school where performances were given, although, Warshawsky said with typical frankness, it “took considerable courage” to sit through one of Rousseau’s concerts.
“Le Douanier” Rousseau, 1890 (image credit 8.6)
In 1908 Picasso, in mock homage, gave a party for Rousseau, although everything went wrong. The meal never arrived. Rousseau, seated on a thronelike chair, and with too much to drink, fell asleep. Some wag thought it would be a great joke to smear his mouth with a soapy foam to suggest delirium tremens. A small pyramid of candle wax from a nearby candelabra formed itself on his head. The tragic and farcical seemed inextricably mixed in the life of this gullible and bumbling clown. Still, no one was prepared for what happened in 1910. Rousseau had just completed one of his most magical jungle scenes, The Dream, and it was on view that March in the Salon des Indépendants. In addition to the predictable lush foliage and hungry wild beasts, it depicted a lavishly curved lady reclining on a sofa. The model was a fiftyish widow who worked in a draper’s shop. Rousseau was madly in love with her, even persuading Vollard and Apollinaire to write poetry in her honor. He wanted to make her his third wife, but the lady refused. She is said to have remarked, “His breath smells of death”—and was not even tempted when he offered to leave her his estate.
That summer, Rousseau hurt his leg and infection set in. He was admitted to the hospital, where he spent his days writing letters to his beloved that were not answered. Then, on September 2, 1910, and to general consternation, he died. A great Primitivist had, simply by being himself, attracted the interest of some sophisticated theorists, Picasso among them, showing what could be done to explore dream states. What is the nature of the Self? “For me the essential thing is to tell our life by any mythological means,” Salvador Dalí once said. Rousseau, with his direct line to the unconscious, seemed to have discovered intuitively what the Surrealists, Dalí included, would have to puzzle out painfully in the years to come.
The first writings of Francis Carco, called Instincts, were published in 1911. Carco, a poet and novelist, Modigliani’s contemporary, was writing about sensuality, alcohol, violence, and la vie de Bohème. He continued to publish his observations and reminiscences, many of them fictionalized portraits, for the next thirty years. He saw la vie de Bohème from a particular psychological perspective, as the child of a moralistic and often cruel father, who realized how much revolt and revenge underlay his choice of lifestyle. Since he had the gift of detachment he also saw others’ choices with particular clarity and discrimination.
For Carco, Bohemia was “a form of social theater … for which its ostensibly hostile audience felt an obscure need,” Jerrold Seigel wrote in Bohemian Paris. Bohemian life often led to nothing, Carco believed, “because its flow was ‘a perpetual dispersion.’ New possibilities, new temptations, confronted its denizens at every moment. Their minds were beset by contradictory goals and attractions rendered more persuasive by idleness, boredom and poverty.” Those on the fringes of a particular artistic movement but without the talent would spend their lives in a fruitless pursuit of the chimeras of their youth. “Between the two wars, Carco found that Cubism had left behind a human debris that reminded him of the earlier ex-companions of Toulouse-Lautrec: ‘these endings of generations are horrifying.’ ”
Carco thought, in common with Baudelaire, that the only escape from the eventual annihilation of the spirit that Bohemia represented was the discipline of work. In those days work was all that Modigliani had. There were very few sales, he still had no dealer, he shifted from one squalid hole to the next or moved in with this week’s mistress, and the future was bleak. Although he always expressed complete confidence in his gifts, he must have met those ravaged beings who had bet everything on a throw of the artistic dice and lost, and wondered at some level whether he, too, was chasing a mirage. This may have strengthened his determination not to follow any movement, relying on his own idiosyncratic vision; better to be ridiculed, but noticed, like Rousseau, than destined for oblivion. Or perhaps—he was, after all, only twenty-four—he never thought of such things. He was simply being true to the vows he and Ghiglia had made seven years before. There was a battle ahead. They must be prepared to suffer every hardship, bend every sinew in pursuit of the ultimate achievement. That goal could not be self-aggrandizement. As for John Keats, another tuberculosis sufferer, so with Modigliani: it was art for art’s sake. “Beauty must be a good in its own right, even a metaphysical principle. In serving beauty, Keats came to believe, he was in some obscure way serving the divine.”
In the four years Modigliani worked as a sculptor, roughly 1910 to the spring of 1913, he made repeated attempts to sell his work. Besides exhibiting his heads at the Salon des Indépendants he was trying to interest dealers and when this, too, failed, he hit on a scheme to show them himself. He met a young Portuguese artist, then living at the Cité Falguière, De Souza Cardoso, also called Amedeo, whose style resembled his own. “Only Cardoso’s more highly coloured use of drawing … and the more decorative value of his line allow us to distinguish his works from those of Modigliani,” Jeanne Modigliani wrote. Cardoso’s family was comfortably off, and after he married and moved into a new and more spacious studio near the Quai d’Orsay, in 1911 the two Amedeos decided to hold their own show. Cardoso’s paintings and drawings were hung beside Modigliani’s caryatids, and seven of Modigliani’s heads were placed, with great care, around the room. It was a bold, even clever, move. Friends came to admire but did not stay to buy. The critics ignored the exhibition. Nothing sold.
The first sale of his sculpture did not take place for four years, and then the buyer, as might be expected, was not a gallery-goer or even a connoisseur but a famous artist. In 1913 Augustus John, over from London, visited Modigliani’s studio with his wife Dorelia. He found the floor “covered with statues, all much alike and prodigiously long and narrow” and bought two of them on the spot. The price was a few hundred francs. For a man accustomed to surviving on three francs a day it must have seemed as if the heavens had opened. Modigliani slightingly described himself as a creator of garden statuary. But he also remarked, “Comme c’est chic d’être dans le progrès!” (How chic it is to be in the swim), and the two struck up a friendship. Nina Hamnett, the British sculptor who had yet to meet Modigliani, recalled being told by Epstein that Modigliani wanted to be paid in installments, a request that some in his circle would have found hard to believe.
Modigliani was always sketching portraits of his friends, and once at Montmartre he joined the legions of “café artists” who made the rounds in the hope of finding willing sitters. Their methods varied little, according to Sisley Huddleston, an English writer who wrote about Montparnasse and Bohemia in the years between the wars. The artist, portfolio under his arm, would enter the café, size up the situation, and then wend his way through the tables. He was likely to stop hopefully and smile. At the least look of enquiry he had drawn up a chair and begun work. From long experience he knew the subject would be a lady, preferably wearing a splendid hat to which he would give close attention. If the artist had done his work the portrait would be flattering, the lady delighted, and her escort perfectly willing to buy. Most artists, Huddleston said, were lucky to find three willing subjects a night, and if they all bought he was even luckier.
Modigliani could be seen almost every night at the Rotonde, with his nonchalant walk, his blue portfolio always under his arm, and then “drawing ceaselessly in a notebook the pages of which he was forever tearing out and crumpling up,” Carco wrote. Conrad Moricand, a painter, author, and astrologer, often watched him at work. He wrote that Modigliani would look with concentration on the face before him and then begin to draw with an incisive pencil. “His working method was always the same. He would begin with the two essential points, first the nose of his model, which one finds emphasized in all his work, next the eyes, with their different polarities, then the mouth and finally the outline of the face, delicately indicated by cross-hatching.” As he began work his handsome face would contort itself into the most frightful grimaces and he would be deaf to everything going on around him, including the constant jokes and teasing. “He was usually good for four or five drawings like this, sometimes more, that were superb. The rest were usually dissolved in drink.”
The painting of Jean Cocteau by Modigliani that the sitter took some pains not to own (image credit 8.7)
Maurice de Vlaminck, who also watched him working, said, “I can see him (he was no fool) distributing his sketches to surrounding friends in exchange for a drink. With the gesture of a millionaire he would hold out the sheet of paper (on which he sometimes went so far as to sign his name) as he might have held out a banknote in payment to someone who had just brought him a glass of whisky.” Jean Cocteau said, “He used to hand out his drawings like some gypsy fortuneteller, giving them away, and that explains why, although there are some fifty drawings of me in existence, I only own one.”
Cocteau, painter, writer, and film director, was also painted by Modigliani. While he sat for his portrait the rain beat ceaselessly on the skylight and Cocteau, who had that reputation, talked without stopping—not that anyone listened, according to the poet Pierre Reverdy, who was there. Cocteau once referred to the resulting portrait as “diabolical” and said he considered it proof that Modigliani detested him. Diabolical is too strong a word, but the painting did not flatter, as had so many other artists who painted this prominent personality. In any event Cocteau never took the painting home. He bought it for the derisory sum of five francs and then, under the pretext that the painting was too large and he did not have the money to transport it, left it in the studio of their mutual friend Moïse Kisling. Time went by, Kisling gave it to the proprietor of the Rotonde to settle a debt, and it hung in the café over a banquette for several years. The painting went through several hands and was finally sold to a pair of American collectors for millions of francs. Cocteau did not like that much either. “All I have left,” he complained, “is a colour photograph.”
Foujita recalled, “At that period Modigliani was spending most of his time on sculpture; he did no painting and only made pencil drawings. He always dressed in corduroy, and he wore checked shirts and a red belt, like a workman. His thick hair was usually tousled. He drank a great deal of Pernod and often did not have enough money to pay for it. When people invited him to have a drink at their table, he would do sketches and then give them the drawings by way of thanks. He had a habit of scowling and grimacing a good deal, and he was always saying ‘Sans blague!’ (‘No kidding!’)…We were both fond of poetry, and every time he came to see me he recited a poem by Tagore.”
An English artist, C. R. W. Nevinson, met Modigliani in 1911, for a time shared a studio, and kept up the friendship until he died. Nevinson described him as “a quiet man of charming manners … I knew him as well as, if not better than, most men … Modigliani should have been the father of a family. He was kind, constant, correct and considerate: a bourgeois Jew.” Nevinson added, “[H]e loved women and women loved him. They seemed to know instinctively that though he was poor, they were in the presence of a great man. Painters were two a penny in Montparnasse, yet even the most mercenary of the girls would treat him as the painter and the prince. They would look after him, scrub for him, cook for him, sit for him; and before they went away they would beg him to accept a little gift, ‘for art’s sake.’ ” “ ‘Modi was all charm, all impulsiveness, all disdain,’ his future dealer Paul Guillaume said, ‘and his aristocratic soul remained among us in all its many-coloured, ragged beauty.’ ”
“For art’s sake …” There are endless stories, most of them probably apocryphal, about Modigliani’s overnight flights from one miserable hovel to another and the chagrin of landlords who arrived to find a few sticks of furniture and some apparently worthless artworks. “So little did he value the belongings he had seized,” is the usual opening sentence, “that the …” landlord, in a fury, gives the paintings away, tosses them onto a rubbish dump, tears them up, or burns them. The story concerning Modigliani’s overnight departure from the Cité Falguière has the merit of being original, at least. In this case the landlord’s wife decides the yards of canvas will come in handy as dust covers for her mattresses, sofas, and the like. The day finally arrives, long after Modigliani’s death, that he is famous. A dealer appears at the door. He has heard. He will pay. He flashes a wad of francs. The landlord is overjoyed. Where are those dirty old canvases we were using? His wife produces them. They are blank. Oh, that nasty old paint? She made sure to scrape it all off before wrapping their valuables. Her husband collapses.
A great artist starts all over again, this time in a hut at the bottom of the garden at 216 boulevard Raspail, with a mattress on the floor, a single rickety chair, a jug and a basin, and whatever he has saved of his unfinished sculptures. The cultured man who has willingly embraced the fate of the meanest workman, wearing his clothes, sharing his privations—the contradiction is puzzling only if one discounts the family history, one that began the day he was born. He would have learned from his mother that it was possible to retain one’s pride no matter how humbling the circumstances. Thanks to his brother Emanuele, he was well versed in the class struggle, exploitation, and oppression. Although he took no active role in politics, Modigliani considered himself a Socialist. His knowledge of what the working masses endured had made for a special mixture of anger, indignation, and sympathetic understanding that Modigliani would bring to bear on outcasts. In Paris he sought out and befriended at least two unappreciated and vastly talented artists whose situations were as desperate as his own. One of them was Maurice Utrillo.
Maurice Utrillo, in the ménage he shared with his artist mother, Susan Valadon, and his stepfather, André Utter, 1920s (image credit 8.8)
Utrillo, the illegitimate son of Suzanne Valadon, had been given wine diluted with water from babyhood by Valadon’s illiterate mother. By the time he was eighteen he was a hopeless alcoholic and spent the first of many visits in an insane asylum. When he was released his mother, herself an artist, was advised to find him a hobby and gave him his first box of paints. He turned out to have an astonishing gift, beginning the career that would bring him international fame. Carco wrote of his Montmartre streets and squares, “There shines upon the walls, upon the houses with closed shutters, upon the brown windows of bistrots a fixed light which comes from nowhere, except from … dream regions.” When sober Utrillo was shy, unassuming, and gentle. When drunk he would begin to yell, stare around the room, and start breaking glasses and bottles. For years he was treated as the village idiot, subject to the kinds of humor that makes a staggering man even funnier by being tripped up, or, as he lies comatose in a gutter, stripping him nude. Artists are always the first to appreciate each other’s work, and a few were beginning to recognize Utrillo’s special qualities when Modigliani met him, but dealers rejected him. Modigliani, whose eye for talent was exceptional, rose to Utrillo’s defense.
Michel Georges-Michel, author of the portrait of Modigliani as haunted, hunted, and self-destructive, is hardly a reliable witness. However, in one case, he seems likely to have been close to the mark. He recounts that he was there when Modigliani began painting a portrait of Léon Bakst, the costume and scene designer, and the conversation came around to the depressing nature of Utrillo’s subject matter.
Modigliani responded, “One paints only what one sees,” Georges-Michel recalled.
Take the painters out of their hovels! Yes, art lovers and dealers are shocked that instead of landscapes we paint only ugly suburbs with trees all black and twisted and covered in soot and smoke, and interiors in which the living room is right next to the toilet! Since we are forced to live like rag-and-bone men in such lowly dwellings, these are the impressions which we reproduce. Every age gets the painters it deserves, and the subjects drawn from life which it gives them. During the Renaissance the painters lived in palaces, in velvet, in the sun! And today, just look at the filth in which a painter such as Utrillo must live, at the hospitals he has been forced to attend, then you will no longer ask why he paints only dirt-encrusted walls, disease-ridden streets, barred window after barred window!
Utrillo, that damaged and fragile talent, at least had the desultory ministrations of his mother and her new husband, André Utter, an apprentice tiler on the Butte Montmartre turned artist, who became his stepfather. Father and stepson were the same age—a state of affairs that made both acutely uncomfortable. Valadon and Utter periodically rescued Utrillo, made him paint, tried to ration his wine, and, when all else failed, put him back in the hospital. After Utrillo amazed everyone by becoming commercially successful they gratefully helped him spend his money.
Curiously, no paintings or drawings of Utrillo by Modigliani have come down to us, although the artist memorialized almost everyone he knew, sometimes repeatedly. But another friend often sat for his portrait, Chaim Soutine. This eleventh child of a Russian Jewish tailor, living in a filthy, one-room hut, starved and beaten, was rescued by a rabbi who recognized his talent and sent him to art school, first in Minsk, then the Fine Arts Academy in Vilna. There he met two other talented artists, Michel Kikoïne and Pinchus Krémègne. His gift was clearly evident, but so was his poor health. Years of semi-starvation had made him almost as dependent on wine as Utrillo. Marevna, who knew him well, wrote that by the time Soutine arrived in Paris, “his digestion was already ruined and he had a diseased liver. In addition, he suffered from a nervous affliction of the left eye and … frequent attacks of some, as yet undiagnosed, malady.” Later he would have an emotional breakdown, painted in unmistakable outline in a series of contorted compositions.
Soutine, in his days at La Ruche when he was painting flayed carcasses. Paulette Jourdain, one of Modigliani’s models, is seen in a partial view. (image credit 8.9)
Krémègne, Kikoïne, and Marevna were staying at La Ruche when Soutine joined them in 1913. Unlike the Bateau Lavoir and the Cité Falguière, ramshackle apartments which occasionally kept artists and sculptors out of the rain, La Ruche (“the Beehive”) was specifically designed for artists by its philanthropic owner, Alfred Boucher, a wealthy sculptor. The international exhibition of 1900 contained a polygonal wine pavilion designed by Gustave Eiffel, of Eiffel Tower fame. Boucher, who owned semi-rural land on the southern edge of Montparnasse, had the clever idea of turning the building into studios, honeycomb fashion, so that each unit would have its own source of natural light. The building was moved to its new site and further ornamented with happy heedlessness. An enormous Art Nouveau wrought-iron doorway, salvaged from the Women’s Pavilion, graced its façade, along with some caryatids from the British India exhibition; the total effect was whimsical, even playful. Then he rented out the studios at cost to up-and-coming young artists like Léger, Soffici, Chagall, Archipenko, and Zadkine.
A recent view of the gated entrance to La Ruche (image credit 8.10)
La Ruche was full of fun but the same discomfort and, once a few feckless tenants had moved in, the predictable camp followers: mice, rats, cockroaches, lice, and the ever-present flies. It had a special drawback in that it flanked the slaughterhouses of Vaugirard. To its other idiosyncrasies were added the wafting smells of putrifying flesh and the bellows of dying beasts. Nevertheless, its eighty studios were in great demand and more would be built. La Ruche was “seething with vitality,” Marevna wrote.
Soutine made an immediate impression on her. “His clothes, unlike the workmen’s blue linen jackets and trousers favoured by other artists, were beige, with red and blue neckerchiefs; I was told that he made them himself. Like the clothes of the other artists they were always covered with paint.” She thought he was plain, even ugly. René Gimpel did not have quite that impression: “He is small, sturdy, with a thick crop of hair whirling around his head. He has deep, round, hooded eyes; they are of hard stone.” Marevna may have been influenced by Soutine’s belittling self-portraits, which always show him with tiny eyes, a bulbous nose, and huge, prominent mouth and ears, distortions which one finds uncannily mirrored in the portraits of Francis Bacon. However, actual photographs give a different impression: that of a sensitive, introspective, even handsome man. As with Utrillo, Modigliani’s sympathies were immediately aroused, and for similar reasons. Soutine did not speak French: Modigliani would teach him. This reticent, fearful, unwashed peasant, who slept in doorways and had never used a toothbrush or handled a fork, obviously needed a mentor. And Modigliani, at his most destitute, never looked poor. His suit would be clean, his shirt, which he had washed the night before, rumpled but otherwise presentable, his shoes cleaned, and no one knew how he managed, but every morning, bright and early, he was shaved and ready for work. Modigliani the outgoing, vivacious intellectual and this diamond in the rough took one look at each other and became friends. Soutine said, “He gave me confidence in myself.”
Soutine is best known for his depictions of flayed carcasses. But in fact, as an exhibition in Paris amply demonstrated in 2008, these are only a small part of an oeuvre that encompasses portraits, still lifes, landscapes, cityscapes, and much more. In contrast to Modigliani’s refined and elegant canvases, Soutine’s are noisy and spontaneous. They swivel and pivot with a quality reminiscent of Chagall; once, when alcohol made him dizzy, Modigliani said, “Everything dances around me as in a landscape by Soutine.” Soutine’s landscapes do not unroll, they buzz and hum. Cityscapes shatter like kaleidoscopes, portraits seize you by the throat, and still lifes throb with the music of the universe.
Soutine, early 1920s, with his dealer, Léopold Zborowski, at left (image credit 8.11)
The manner in which Modigliani painted hands is often meant as a clue to the initiated. In one portrait of Soutine Modigliani seems to be emulating the model set by Cézanne some years before. In his portrait La Femme à la cafetière, Cézanne depicts a lady, stolid, mannish, all in blue, hands limply placed in her lap. She looks formidable, but then one notices that her sleeves stop short to reveal her oddly vulnerable wrists. Modigliani used this device to the same effect in one of his portraits of Soutine, then in his early twenties but looking more like a forlorn adolescent. In another portrait painted the same year (1916), Soutine’s right hand, resting on a knee, is oddly placed with a gap between the third and fourth finger. This was meant, Marc Restellini wrote in L’Ange au visage grave, to signify the Jewish priestly blessing. If so, it was a subtle reference to the heritage they shared that many would not recognize. Without minimizing Soutine’s prominent eyes and full lips, “Modigliani manages also to convey a kind of poetic beauty in his sitter, that special brand of idealization for which he is justly famous,” Kenneth E. Silver wrote. It could have also conveyed the special place Soutine had won in Modigliani’s affections. When he was very ill, Modigliani told his dealer that he could not recover. But, he said, “don’t worry—I’m leaving you Soutine.”
In his study Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905–1945, (1985), Silver described the unique status Modigliani held among other Jewish immigrant artists and sculptors. They were Ashkenazim, recently arrived from Russia and Poland: Sonia Delaunay, Moïse Kisling, Oscar Miestchaninoff, Simon Mondzain, Marevna, Jacques Lipchitz, Léon Indenbaum, Kikoïne, and Krémègne. Modigliani was a Sephardic Jew but also Italian born, with an important link to the “Greco-Roman and Italianate roots of Western art.” In a quick sketch he made of Chana Orloff on the back of an envelope, Modigliani wrote in Hebrew letters, “Chana, Daughter of Raphael,” enlightening in its casual cross-cultural references. Silver notes that many religious symbols, not just Stars of David, appear in Modigliani’s art. As for his personal beliefs, Modigliani was casually blunt. “Hello, I’m Jewish,” was the direct approach to anyone who was not, as Akhmatova and Hamnett have recorded. He was equally ready to start a fight if necessary. A story widely repeated has him berating a group of Royalists at a café table who were overheard making anti-Semitic remarks. Noël Alexandre wrote that in 1910 Modigliani gave his father a drawing, a portrait of himself in a Jewish tunic. He was also wearing a beard, something that Paul Alexandre carefully noted he only kept for a few weeks. As for Orloff, who hailed from Palestine, Modigliani once told her, “I carry no religion, but if I did it would be the ancient Jewish religion of my ancestors.”
“I’ll definitely see you on Friday—after death of course.” Paul Alexandre, who was never interested in such things, would have dismissed that reference with a laugh. But for Modigliani the omen of a comet streaking across the sky had just as much possible significance as the most profound questions about art. “How we used to hammer out the solution of things in those days!” wrote Christopher Nevinson, his sometime roommate. Every night at the cafés there would be endless discussions, on “harmony, and sometimes colour, sometimes drawing, sometimes imagination, sometimes fantasy, sometimes spiritualism, sometimes the unconscious … sometimes religion, and sometimes the lack of it.” There was a moment when Modigliani was passionately interested in the prophecies of Nostradamus, Ilya Ehrenburg recalled, ascribing to that sixteenth-century savant all manner of predictions, including the unification of Italy, the fall of Napoleon, and the use of airplanes in war.
Léopold Survage, an artist who met Modigliani at the Rotonde before World War I, said, “Like all Italians Modigliani was very superstitious. It was human beings that interested him most of all and the invisible forces that were at work in them. Behind the physical appearance he imagined … a mysterious world.
“One evening we encountered a drunk on the street who was walking with great difficulty and who made contortions and was doing amazing acrobatics without ever falling. ‘Look,’ said Modigliani, ‘the evil spirits are calling to him, but he is resisting them and fighting.’ ”
Modigliani’s primitive superstitions, ones that had been handed on through the Garsins, their nurses, and home-based healers, had certainly survived. But, as Survage also observed, “Behind the physical appearance he imagined … a mysterious world.” All accounts agree that Modigliani was extremely well read. Being related, as he believed, to Spinoza led to an interest in the ideas of philosophers and psychiatrists as well as poets and painters. He could have stumbled across a theory of Arthur Schopenhauer’s on the hidden pattern behind the seemingly random event. Schopenhauer’s treatise, Jung writes, was the origin for his own article on “Synchronicity,” a term he uses to describe either a premonitory dream, vision, or premonition, or the phenomenon of similar dreams, thoughts, and ideas occurring simultaneously in different people. Such a theory of meaningful coincidence would have been as attractive to Modigliani as it was to the nineteenth-century German philosopher. Both were entranced by “the great dream of life.”
As has been noted, Eugénie, the witness of so many deaths and chaotic reversals of family fortunes, was a spiritualist, as was Rodolfo Mondolfi, her close friend and perhaps lover. Modigliani’s subsequent interest in the subject seems perfectly understandable, given his serious illnesses. He may even have had a near-death experience. It is fascinating to speculate about this particularly on the occasion when he almost died of tuberculosis, but there is no evidence one way or the other. It is known that as an adolescent he began attending séances—what Margherita dismissed as “a vulgar fantasy”—and again when he was a student in Venice. Of the earliest drawings in the Paul Alexandre collection, executed in black crayon, Chinese ink, and watercolor, one shows a woman taking part in a séance. The second depicts a male medium with a fixed gaze in the act of “Table-turning,” as Modigliani titled the sketch. Certainly his friends were well aware of his interest in the subject. One of the authors of Artist Quarter recalled that Modigliani drew him wearing “shorts, an open shirt and bare arms, with a Tirai hat on my head and the head of a hunting dog protruding between my thighs. I am practically certain he couldn’t have known that I had spent many years in Central Africa.” Beatrice Hastings, their mutual friend, “always insisted that he was a medium.”
Léopold Survage, 1935 (image credit 8.12)
Modigliani, always a great talker, tended to limit his missives to telegrammatic dimensions. Perhaps by way of compensation he was a sophisticated symbolist, adorning drawings in particular with cryptic references that might be the equivalent of a wink and a knowing nudge, or, by contrast, some quiet, obscure joke he was having at their expense. Or there might be a poem in the latest Symbolist style with oblique personal meaning, rather like the recurrence of the seated nurse theme in Salvador Dalí’s works.
One of the few such gnomic statements that have come down to us is from a 1907 sketchbook: “What I am searching for is neither the real nor the unreal, / But the Subconscious, the mystery of what is Instinctive in the Race.”
Modigliani’s watercolor of A Table-turning, or, Portrait of a Medium, in the Alexandre collection, dated 1905–06 (image credit 8.13)
It sounds like a fashionable Surrealist statement. The fact is that Modigliani was toying with such an idea ten years before the word “Surrealism” was coined by Apollinaire, and seventeen years before André Breton’s first Manifeste in 1924. Both Modigliani and those in the Dadaist and Surrealist movements were making heroic efforts to free themselves from nineteenth-century artistic convention, delving below consciousness to arrive at a new direction. They sought the liberating effects of inspired, random connections, what Breton called “Pure psychic Automatism.” They were “in open rebellion against all forms of established order, whether intellectual, moral, religious, social or artistic,” Noël Alexandre commented. There is no doubt Modigliani, as a Socialist, was just as much in rebellion against the bourgeoisie, but he had a larger goal in mind. Survage recalled him saying, “We are building a new world using forms and colours, but the mind of the Lord will reign over it.” His goal in plumbing what Jung has called the collective unconscious was to search for spiritual insights, “the secret truth of the profound being in which he had the originality to believe.” Restellini wrote, “Behind the legend of the sole artiste maudit of the twentieth century stands a visionary artist with an extremely radical philosophical conception of his art.”
Modigliani also liked to quote d’Annunzio’s observation, “Life is a Gift: from the few to the many: from Those who Know and Have to those who neither Know nor Have.” In the category of those who knew, no one had a better appreciation of life’s fleeting beauty and terrible fragility than he did. In 1910, the night of Halley’s Comet and Modigliani’s note, Paul Alexandre’s mother, the wife of Jean-Baptiste, might just have been feeling ill. In any event she died after a short illness, in 1911. It was tuberculosis. Another shock was to overtake the Alexandres that same year. Jean showed signs of the same dreaded disease and died two years later. Noël Alexandre wrote, “Jean was nursed from the first signs of illness, in 1911, and with all the means at the disposal of a family full of doctors and pharmacists. Nothing worked. The only result was that, perhaps, his agony lasted longer.”
That Modigliani was much affected by the death of Paul Alexandre’s mother was unlikely, but Jean in danger with an affliction he knew only too well was something else. Jean, the student he had drawn and painted, who emptied his pockets for him, encouraged him, his companion and friend—Jean was as close as a brother and the Alexandres almost Modigliani’s second family. Jean’s illness continued to develop, and at some point that winter of 1912–13 it must have been clear that he could not recover. Modigliani’s tendency to panic at any threat to the collective well-being was almost reflexive, and that winter he began to show signs of distress. Brancusi dropped by one day and discovered him on the floor, unconscious beside a block of stone he was carving. Accounts conflict but it seems likely that this was the same year that the concierge at 216 boulevard Raspail found him similarly unconscious and frozen with cold. The police were obliged to climb over blocks of stone with a stretcher in order to rescue him. Another friend, Ortiz de Zárate, also called in one day and found Modigliani in a faint on the floor. He was so worried, it is said, that he took up a collection to send Modigliani back to Livorno.
Modigliani was emaciated and spitting up blood. Something of his state of mind may, perhaps, be gained from the experience of that fellow sufferer, Keats, after a coughing fit brought up blood. Keats’s friend, the artist Charles Brown, recalled one evening that Keats was examining a drop of blood on a bedsheet. “[H]e looked up into my face, with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said,—‘I know that colour of that blood;—it is arterial blood; … my death-warrant;—I must die.”