“Nenette”
Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “Experience”
LIKE PICASSO, Modigliani fell in love with enthusiasm, drawing and painting the beloved incessantly as if the new relationship were the stimulus that would unlock some unsuspected aspect of himself. But now he also needed someone living with him. After collapsing often enough in his studio, he no longer dared live alone. He needed a special kind of person, and Beatrice had many desirable qualities: an urge to nurture, similar political convictions, a love of literature, music, and art, and, even if her ambition exceeded her grasp, a poetic approach to experience. Losing her was a serious blow, for all the reasons why they loved and misunderstood each other.
One of the stumbling blocks was certainly her quaint notion that, even though she had succeeded in a man’s world, and was smoking, drinking, and engaging in free love, she was somehow not a feminist. No doubt she gave an old-fashioned Italian like Modigliani some very mixed messages. How could he believe her if, indeed, he found her in bed with Pina, as seems likely? Did she not understand he was being cuckolded, made a laughingstock? This to him was treachery; to her, merely annoying proof of his boring bourgeois attitudes. The fact that he immediately replaced her with Simone Thiroux, another kindhearted girl who was even more quietly desperate and promiscuous than his Beà, indicates the extent of his need for somebody just then. That affair also ended abruptly and (one guesses) for the identical reason—but in any case, it was a distraction that had served its purpose. As for the banquet, to confront Pina was a required public ritual, more style than substance. No doubt he was relieved to have been hustled safely out of the room; Pina was probably equally grateful to have been spared the necessity of firing a gun. Having closed one door Modigliani opened another, becoming absorbed by a love who would meet his needs to the letter. Or almost all.
She was Jeannette, or Jeanne, Hébuterne, an art student whom he met at the end of 1916, that is to say, a few months before the Braque banquet. Descriptions of her painted in the last eighty years are in bare outline, hampered by her family’s, and particularly her brother André’s, refusal to talk about her. Patrice Chaplin, a British novelist and playwright, made a determined effort to uncover Jeanne’s story in the 1980s and published her findings in Into the Darkness Laughing (1990). The title is an apparent reference to Modigliani’s recklessness and its attraction for Jeanne. Chaplin managed to make contact with Frédérique Prud-Hon, daughter of Roger Wild and Germaine Labaye, both friends of Modigliani’s as well as Jeanne’s. Chaplin was allowed to read letters between Jeanne and Germaine that had been kept in a locked metal box for decades. She also believed she had uncovered another illegitimate child of Modigliani’s, a daughter, in the south of France. She met some old friends and visited the apartment in the rue de la Grande Chaumière. In the end, her portrait of Jeanne remained largely speculative, a creation of her novelistic impulses because the Hébuternes would not see her.
However, Jeanne’s great-nephew Luc Prunet, a lawyer in Meaux, and Marc Restellini, a museum director in Paris and leading expert on Modigliani, recently collaborated on a study that was published to coincide with an exhibition in Tokyo, “Le Couple Tragique” (2007). Thanks to the release of substantial numbers of hitherto unknown drawings, paintings, photographs, postcards, and other family memorabilia, Jeanne Hébuterne emerges, not as the passive, compliant figure she has been painted, but a distinctive personality in her own right.
Hébuterne’s family came from the area around Meaux, an important agricultural center (famous for its brie) that was established in Roman times, and with a cathedral to St. Stephen dating back to the twelfth century. Once surrounded by fields, the town, some thirty miles to the northeast of Paris, linked by commuter trains, has become something of a satellite for immigrants who cannot afford city rents. Achille, a handsome and promising young executive, moved to Paris with his wife Eudoxie and became chief accountant for a perfume house. Like department stores, parfumeries are intensely focused on presentation and novelty, always on the alert for the latest trends in art. In his photographs Achille looks very much the businessman but one with a well-hidden interest in music, sculpture, and art. He was also a passionate convert to Catholicism and, it was said, would insist on reading Pascal aloud while his wife and daughter peeled the potatoes.
Eudoxie Anaïs Tellier, the girl he married, was not pretty but had a marked sense of style. Known as “Ocze,” she wore her black hair to her knees, and favored kimonos with bright and splashy motifs. She covered the walls of their apartment on the rue Amyot in the fifth arrondissement with paintings, fragrant logs burned in the fireplace, a cuckoo clock on a wall marked the hours and quarters, and there was a delicious smell of citron about the place. She played the piano, accompanying herself with a repertoire of songs, painted a bit, and read poetry. A wife who flutters about in butterfly robes, sits sewing at the window, sings to her children (André was Jeanne’s senior by four years), and is artistic would have a natural appeal for a husband whose livelihood depends on the art of selling the inessential.
They were well matched in one sense, but in another, there was friction. Georgette-Céline Hébuterne, who married André, said, “Mr. Hébuterne was rather stricter and more severe. His indulgence had its limits, and he wouldn’t stand all this arty stuff when it went too far. On the other hand [Eudoxie], in her romantic way, was very much taken with artists and their lives (she obviously didn’t at all realize just what ‘artistic life’ in Montparnasse was like at the time). This difference in attitude of course led to friction but also to a certain concealment, to hiding things from one another.”
With her strongly marked brows, long nose, and full lips Jeanne, like her mother, could not be considered classically beautiful. Her great asset was a ravishing plunge of heavy brown hair, vibrant with red and gold highlights, which she put up in long braids, hair parted in the center and with a bandeau around her forehead. Photographs show her at the age of seventeen gravely facing the camera and looking up from under her eyelashes in a manner reminiscent of the late Princess Diana, a mixture of shy and seductive charm. She was petite, with tiny hands and feet, very much an individualist. In adolescence she began designing and making her own clothes and jewelry. She was intellectually curious and had read Nietzsche, Denys l’Aréopagite, and Léon Bloy. She played the violin expertly and was learning Russian. She had memorized by heart a poem by Ilya Ehrenburg that he had written for a much-loved granddaughter whose health was fragile: “God has many stars in his unclouded Paradise. But I only have you. Stay a little while, do not die. Please don’t die.”
Stanislas Fumet, French essayist, poet, editor, and art critic, who was two years Jeanne’s senior, said that he and his future wife Aniouta saw Jeanne on the streets in the years leading up to World War I, long before they met her. In those days she was
a very young girl with long tresses, always alone, whose bright-eyed, very special quality captivated us. We would make a point of encountering her in the Latin Quarter or the Luxemburg Gardens, which she crossed every day, a sketchbook under her arm. Her manner of walking, with a slow and deliberate glide, even the way she held her head, was irresistibly swanlike. Her forehead was girded around with a ribbon in Veronese green, and two large coppery plaits came down almost to her knees. She invariably wore a dress of duck egg’s blue and, on her head, the sweetest little cap in some brilliant color.
She was enchanting; the impression was of a paradoxical beauty with the grace and equilibrium of a Grecian amphora. “Her unique appeal—perhaps her spirit—was that of a rare aquatic plant, brought to life from the alchemical fluid of some magician. As a flower, she would have been a waterlily; as a precious stone, an emerald.”
They were eventually introduced by their joint friend Chana Orloff, who would execute a full-length sculpture of Jeanne and her signature braids. “The first time Jeanne and Aniouta went for a walk it was to talk about suicide. Aniouta has never forgotten it. Jeanne said she did not pity anyone in the world so much as those who took their own lives. ‘How very much they must suffer to be driven to that,’ she said.” She was just seventeen.
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 André, just twenty, handsome and self-assured, was launched on his lifelong career as an artist, mostly of landscapes in the Impressionist manner. It was not surprising that Jeanne, with her instinctive sense of color and original style, would have followed André’s lead. Her mentor was ebullient, outgoing; she was quieter and reflective. She often drew his portrait and he also painted her, although the family has never made these works public. Jeanne might have measured her words but it would be a mistake to think she was malleable. André’s diary records that she also argued regularly with an abbé her family knew. Prunet said, “Here we have a girl who, before 1918, is contradicting an abbé!” He added, “I can tell you that within her family circle she often went ‘head to head’ with her father.”
At her best, Jeanne was gentle, affectionate, and loyal. However, whenever she believed herself overruled and misunderstood, she would become resentful and mulish. Once sufficiently wounded, she never forgave. Her work reflects this dichotomy, sometimes expansive and freeform, at other times tight and mannered.
Family relations seem to have been, for the most part, fond and devoted. André and Jeanne had pet names for their parents, “Mémère” and Pépère,” as well as for each other—André addressed his sister as “titsoeur” and she signed herself as “Nenette.” The freedoms given to Jeanne by her parents are mentioned more than once as evidence of their unusual permissiveness. But it has to be recalled that before Frenchwomen gained the vote such social freedoms were relative. The English artist C. R. W. Nevinson, in Paris in the 1930s, wrote about
the appalling tyranny of the average French home life. It is not even now realized in England [he wrote in 1938] how dull and miserable the existence of a woman can be in the Latin countries. My mother and I once met a young girl who was studying at the Sorbonne. Greatly daring, she had dispensed with her bonne and was trying to live a life à l’Anglaise; and the treatment she experienced and the insults which were heaped on her would simply be disbelieved in England … Today France has not changed much in correct circles. No “nice” girl can sit on a café terrasse, even with her own mother, and how relations spy on them!
Bryher, the English author, daughter of a prominent industrialist and financier, wrote, “In 1913 women belonged in the home. My family were truly frightened of the free-thinking little monster that had emerged in their midst [herself]…It would have been the same wherever I had been born, in a cottage or a mansion, in Kent or France. Slavery may be a gentle thing but the threat of the rod is always in the master’s hand.”
The little we know about Achille suggests that, despite his indulgences, he was in most respects a man of his times and a literalist where his religious convictions were concerned, something Jeanne at least found increasingly tiresome. He was the figure around whom family life clearly revolved and Eudoxie, easily intimidated and evasive, accepted her role. Her solution when confronted was to improvise. Jeanne was similarly constrained to passive defiance, at least until she found her protector in Modigliani.
An indication of how Jeanne Hébuterne might have felt about herself is provided by a series of drawings she made in 1915, just before she met Modigliani, to illustrate a best-selling novel, Jours de famine et misère. This is actually a memoir by its author, Neel Doff, thinly disguised, a Belgian author who had, as a child, struggled to overcome starvation and degradation. Her feckless parents, often unable to feed their nine children, drifted from one town to another. Neel Doff became something of a substitute mother, working at menial jobs and at one time becoming a prostitute. Jeanne drew thirty-three illustrations based on excerpts from the story, which is told as a series of vignettes. They are themselves vignettes: a boy spinning a top, a girl holding a child, children coming down a staircase, a nun, a weeping woman. Their execution is compact, enclosed, and curiously detached in feeling. It is as if she were describing herself, but from a very great distance. Still, the penultimate illustration accompanies the sentence, “Alone I raged and cried, squatting on the ancient sofa which served me as a bed.” The artist had certainly never been hungry in that pretty, comfortable apartment on the rue Amyot. But there must have been moments when she could identify with the heroine of Neel Doff’s novel, miserably unhappy and with a panicky feeling of being alone in a hostile world, a feeling that, once encountered, is never forgotten. Something had happened to turn a normal child with an eager smile into an unsmiling, almost unreachable adolescent. Why was she drawn, as Marc Restellini writes in Le Silence éternel, to this harrowing story about “the destruction of the Self”?
A further puzzle is posed by some almost clinical drawings of herself in the nude. Could a premature sexual initiation have taken place? One cannot know. Nor does one know how much importance to place, if any, on the comment by Foujita, the Japanese artist and member of the School of Paris, who knew her and dismissed her as “vicieuse et sensuelle.” Someone from a society like his own would be bound to think of an independent-minded girl in such terms. On the other hand, that there were some stifled resentments under the surface seems undeniable. The artist painted such feelings in glowering self-portraits.
For Modigliani, a quasi-Bohemian who, as Nevinson observed, should have been the head of a bourgeois family, Jeanne Hébuterne, adorably young, inexperienced, impressionable, and plainly talented, would have seemed irresistible. This was the kind of girl one married: discreet, loyal, and quietly deferential, with an unsuspected streak of independent thought and creative accomplishment. As for Jeanne, André had been in the army for two years and she had lost her mentor. Modigliani, as handsome in his dark way as André was in his, had it all. He was a master of his chosen profession. He was charming and gifted, ardent and poetic. He was known everywhere. He knew how to survive on nothing a year. He more than filled the gap in her life.
As for Jeanne, she was all the things he was not: able to manage a household, go on errands, and balance the budget, concealing, behind her self-effacing manner, a quiet dependability. She was young, strong, and had not yet fashioned those complicated connections with other men that can have such disastrous consequences. Those who saw them together agree that Jeanne presented a singularly interesting appearance and that she sat quietly in the background while he did his star turn, holding his hand. The hand holding is a tiny clue suggesting he had transferred to her that absolute need for loving support that would become essential in the months to come. A few, like Fumet and Dr. Dyre Diriks, a friend of Simone’s, sensed the inner resolve behind the stillness. Both she and Modigliani had secrets to hide. Was this part of their bond?
One can safely see her as a crucial emotional anchor in the chaos of his life. One can also see him in a lover’s fever of anticipation. They became lovers on or before May 17, 1917, according to Patrice Chaplin in Into the Darkness Laughing. Hébuterne wrote to her friend Germaine Labaye that Modigliani took her to the Hotel Dieu and she ended up with her underclothes torn. “A night not without a certain horror,” was her laconic comment. Shortly afterward she was in another Paris hotel, they had made love, and she was again writing to Germaine. This letter probably came a month later while her parents were on holiday in Normandy. She had returned to Paris alone, not an easy case to make in the days when respectable unmarried women did not travel without a chaperone. The point of the letter was that she regretted nothing. She then moved in with Modigliani, probably in one of his seedy hotel rooms. Restellini’s study of that period states that her parents knew nothing of the affair for over a year. She spent the day with him, returning innocently every evening to the rue Amyot; she explained her occasional overnight stays by pretending that she was staying with friends. It was a performance worthy of Modigliani and proof, if nothing else, of her spectacular ability to keep a secret. Her mother finally guessed the truth in the spring of 1918 when Jeanne could no longer deny that she was pregnant.
If public health authorities in France and elsewhere in Europe were alarmed enough to try to educate the public to limit the spread of tuberculosis that message, at least in Modigliani’s case, fell on deaf ears, including the warnings against close contact. His behavior was the height of recklessness as he went from one woman to another, exposing her to tuberculosis and also unprotected sex, that led all too often to the predictable results. Was Maud Abrantes pregnant with his child, and was this the reason she returned to her husband, and had she passed the child off as his? What about Beà, who might or might not have had a child by him and who, in any case, could have contracted his disease? What about the sweet, doomed, careless Simone Thiroux, who, in August 1916, did become pregnant with a child she said was his? What about Jeanne herself, with her Catholic upbringing, whom he impregnated in the spring of 1918? She could not be expected to protect herself, but prophylactics of a sort were available for men. If so, this was something Modigliani ignored, with the transparently self-serving statement that the greatest gift a man could give a woman was a baby.
In Simone’s case, he had to know that she could not live long enough to care for Serge Gérard, the little boy who was born in May 1917. She made no bones about her own serious condition. Coughing, bringing up blood, she would treat it all as a great joke, ignoring the truth until she could ignore it no longer. From Modigliani’s point of view it was not his child, could not be, because she was promiscuous. This makes a certain sense if one suspects that he had, indeed, discovered her with another lover. On the other hand he also knew he could not support a wife and child. At least, that is the reason he gave then. Émile Lejeune recalled a conversation on this subject after the birth of Serge. Simone Thiroux, penniless, begged him for work. Lejeune reports that Modigliani said, “It’s a shame that I made a kid, but these things can happen to anybody. Isn’t that right? Anyway, Simone and I were finished by then.
“So what would I have done with this baby? Someone like me, who has never had a penny, was I made to be the father of a family? It’s sad but that’s the way it is.” Modigliani continued to deny his paternity even though his friends saw a startling resemblance in the two-year-old Serge, and since he refused to acknowledge the boy there was nothing the mother could do about it. He continued to reject Simone’s efforts at a reconciliation. She wrote a letter sometime in 1919 begging to see him, presumably just after Jeanne was born. “I loved you too much, and I suffer so much that I ask this as a final plea.” She was not asking for recognition for Serge, “just a little less hate from you.” Whether or not Modigliani replied is not known.
What was he thinking? Had he no regard for the desperate game he was playing, not just with his own life, but the lives of others? Was he still arguing, as he did with Ghiglia all those years before, that “[p]eople like us … have different rights, different values than do normal, ordinary people because we have different needs which put us … above their moral standards”? That would have been predictable. In fairness, it must be said that he treated Jeanne as any self-respecting Italian male would have treated a wife, even though they were not married. His behavior uncannily mirrors the tongue-in-cheek stereotype drawn by Barzini of the peacock male and his harem. He is out on the town making contacts and conquests; she stays in the house, keeping his life functioning smoothly, and ministers to his every need. He also made a serious effort to house her. Thanks to his new dealer they moved into a two-room studio in July 1917, that is to say shortly after they took up life together. There was, of course, no kitchen, bathroom or toilet, running water, or central heat. But given the hovels he had inhabited this third-floor walk-up was almost luxurious. It was on the rue de la Grande Chaumière, right around the corner from everything in the heart of Montparnasse. At no. 8, it was a few doors from the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, at no. 14, and next door to the Académie Colarossi, at no. 10, where Jeanne was studying when they met. She could slip in and out for art lessons almost without leaving home. The apartment consisted of two spacious rooms in an L shape, with banks of windows overlooking a pleasant interior courtyard. Once the lease was signed, Lunia Czechowska and Hanka Zborowska swept, mopped, painted, and scrubbed it. They found a stove, the universal source of heat, and a few pieces of furniture. Modigliani decorated his work space walls in orange and ochre before he moved in. Czechowska wrote, “His joy was such that we were all shaken by it. Poor dear friend, he finally had a corner of his own.” So did Jeanne Hébuterne.
Like Guillaume, Léopold Zborowski was a young man in a hurry, one taking maximum advantage of the preeminent position of Paris in the marketplace of ideas. The better-established artists already being represented, it was Modigliani’s good luck that there were few artists not at the front at a moment when Zborowski was struggling to establish himself. His timing was strangely apt. He had arrived in Paris from Poland to study at the École du Louvre or perhaps the Sorbonne, a month before the outbreak of World War I. After a brief period of being interned he was released with no means of support. He showed his resourcefulness along with superior connoisseurship—he was in his early twenties—by buying books and manuscripts their unsuspecting owners did not realize were valuable, and selling them at a tidy profit. He had a sensitive appreciation for art and, since he was friendly with Kisling, was soon offering to help him sell. That was another success, and before long he was representing Utrillo and joined the Kislings in the same apartment block at 3 rue Joseph Bara. Kisling had a studio up under the roof and the Zborowskis were in the apartment below. This turned out to be the best idea of all because, as a neighbor of the sociable Kislings, Zborowski had automatic entry into the inner circles of Montparnasse, its streams of artists, sculptors, poet-critics, dealers, and eccentrics. Zborowski, who by then had met Hanka, an honorary wife, was just the kind of person the crowd loved, a businessman with a poetic streak who wore his hat at a jaunty angle and was ready to take on anyone. This was good, because Utrillo was a hopeless alcoholic, Modigliani had been turned down by everybody in the past, and his dear friend Soutine, painting his hideous writhing canvases in rags, was not fit for decent company. No doubt everyone was soon quoting Zborowski’s poetry: “Maintenant silence / et subitement avec la brume tombante / l’accordéon parle d’amour aux filles de cuisine et au balayeurs de la rue.”
Modigliani’s art dealer, Léopold Zborowski, 1918 (image credit 12.1)
Zborowski was also a gambler, and when he became rich in years to come lived on a princely scale with fur coats and chauffeurs. Perhaps something about Zborowski’s confidence, his largesse, and his splendid self-assurance reminded Modigliani of his much-loved uncle Amédée. At any rate, he was ready to leave Guillaume, who now had canvases of his own to unload, and being courted by Zborowski was a definite plus. Whether or not he was ever helped in negotiations by Jeanne, who was, after all, a businessman’s daughter, he bargained for and got favorable terms. Guillaume had paid for a studio; now he wanted Zborowski to pay for one, and got it. He also received a daily stipend of fifteen francs, which included canvas, paints, and models, and his contract further stipulated that Zborowski also represent Soutine. Zborowski even threw in a room in his own apartment. His rather large dining room was expendable, so it was appropriated by Modigliani as a studio, and most of his portraits and nudes were painted there during the next two years. Zborowski, not knowing how valuable this contact with Soutine would prove to be, agreed with reluctance, and Hanka would not have him in the house.
In turn Zborowski wanted Modigliani to start painting nudes. This made the best possible business sense. It was all very well to paint portraits, but if the subjects did not buy them the chances of encountering someone else who would were small, as Romaine Brooks found when the time came to stop exhibiting and start selling—and she never did. Nudes were bound to make people stop and look. Modigliani had frequently drawn nudes but never painted them; still, he seems to have agreed readily enough. They are now among his most famous works; a reclining nude sold at Christie’s in New York in 2004 for $26.9 million.
One can admire any of Modigliani’s nude studies for its painterly qualities, its air of assurance, its bravado sweeps of the brush that, with great economy of means, convey the weight of a coverlet, a flash of light in the background, or those tiny, pleasing details that echo the main theme so satisfyingly. One admires most of all the lyrical loveliness of line. Years after he began a search for the simplified line, which Mauroner saw as “a solution to his search for the essential meaning of life,” he perfected it in his magnificent nudes. The female form, idealized, stretches itself out across his canvases in “all the lineaments of gratified desire,” as William Blake wrote. This is innocent pleasure and acceptance, “generous, natural and calm.” One thinks of the painter himself, removing his clothes and arching his back in an unself-conscious celebration of life.
For in fact these works are “as simple, sensuous and passionate as the poetry of Keats,” to quote Kenneth Clark in The Nude. Masks disguise truths; his nudes reveal the essential nature of Modigliani himself. The rage and terrible resentments revealed by Maldoror are the mirror images of a rapturous response to the beauty of life, as revealed by the female form. One might say that this deeply feeling person, crippled by illness, terribly wounded in the past, was fashioning a poetic tribute, a salute to the life he was leaving. He hardly seemed to need a moment’s doubt or hesitation. He just began.
Modigliani’s nudes are all the more remarkable in the context of his time, when measured against Cézanne’s awkward, bulging figures, Matisse’s pseudo-abstractions, and, especially, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. Clark wrote of Matisse’s Blue Nude, “The enjoyment of continuous surfaces, easy transitions, and delicate modeling which had seemed such an essential factor in painting the nude is sacrificed to violent transitions and emphatic simplifications.” As for Picasso’s monumental painting of 1913, his “relation to the nude has been a scarcely resolved struggle between love and hatred,” and this painting “is the triumph of hate. Starting from a brothel theme … it developed into an enraged protest at everything involved in the conventional notion of beauty.” In Modigliani, Werner Schmalenbach writes that the Futurists, an Italian movement in literature and the fine arts that Modigliani never joined, decreed on its founding (1909) that no one paint nudes for the next ten years.
“The futurists … had no moral objections,” Schmalenbach wrote; “they disapproved of the female nude because it was the epitome of tradition in painting.” They might have disapproved less if, at that date, Modigliani’s nudes already existed. These, as it turned out, shocked the bourgeoisie, one of the main aims of the new movement. Schmalenbach thought Modigliani’s position, bridging contemporary trends and the art of the past, was anomalous. “No other painter, in our century or in any other, has painted the female human body as he did. And yet his nudes evoke involuntary associations of Classicism. They are a continuation of a great tradition of European painting, not only thematically but also in the ‘spiritual’ interpretation of the theme, insofar as they constitute a celebration of beauty, immaculateness and perfection, and thus an idealization of physical Nature.” For a sensualist Modigliani’s nudes are naturalness personified, the opposite of the vulgar or obscene. For a classicist they are interpretations, not of ideal form, but naked human flesh. Lovers of Victorian nudes shudder at the indecency of it all. For everyone else, here is the work of a master of finesse, exhibiting sensitive appreciation and a delicacy of understanding.
Having two dealers with some sort of stake in his future enormously improved Modigliani’s chances of getting exhibited. He showed three portraits at the Salon d’Antin exhibition in the summer of 1916, but no nudes. By then he was working on his first six paintings, and these are uneven in quality. As illustrated in Ceroni, one or two look stiff and labored and it took time for Modigliani to develop his sureness of approach. The National Gallery’s reclining nude, now one of the treasures in the Chester Dale collection, is by far the best of this group, a forerunner of his superb series of seated and reclining nudes in 1917–18. The majority make references to the reality of underarm hair and contain decorous hints of pubic hair. These were among the thirty-seven works shown when Modigliani had his first one-man show late in 1917, including many portraits and drawings. Because Zborowski did not yet have a gallery of his own, the show was held at the Galerie B. Weill, 50 rue Taitbout in the ninth arrondissement. Weill was a “prickly, peppery schoolmarm of a woman,” according to Richardson, who had learned how to sell by working for an antique dealer and, once she had a gallery of her own, would display Lautrec and Daumier prints by hanging them like laundry on a clothesline. She had befriended, and sold, Picasso when he was poor, treating him with scrupulous fairness and declining to be offended when he ditched her for a bigger dealer as soon as possible. She sold Matisse as early as 1902, supported Dufy, helped promote Utrillo, and was now out to put Modigliani on the map.
There was a police station across the street, as Weill well knew when she put one (or more) nudes in the window. No doubt it was meant as a publicity stunt. She invited a few carefully chosen people to a vernissage on Monday, December 3, 1917. Unlike the pattern of most such events the guests came and stayed. The door was open and before she knew it passersby joined the throng, there were crowds looking into the windows, and traffic was stopped in the street. Shortly thereafter a plainclothes policeman arrived and asked softly to have the nudes removed from the window. When Weill declined she was escorted across the road and into the office of the chief constable himself.
Berthe Weill’s provocative poster for Modigliani’s first one-man show at her gallery, 1917. The police were called. The model for the poster was Jeanne Hébuterne. (image credit 12.2)
Again she was asked to remove the objectionable objects. She volunteered there were lots more inside. The chief constable was visibly alarmed. Either she removed them all or he was going to impound them. It was an offense against public morals. How could that be, she asked, knowing perfectly well but making him say it. “They’ve got ppppubic hair!” That, for the moment, was that, and Zborowski only sold two drawings at thirty francs each. Weill, evidently realizing she had made a tactical error, bought five paintings so that the artist would not be too discouraged. Modigliani returned temporarily to portraits and when he tackled other nudes the offending areas were covered, as they had been since time immemorial, by lingerie, draperies, or a hand in the right place. His was the dilemma common to every artist, i.e., how to be true to his inner vision and at the same time reconcile himself with what the market wanted to buy, or was ready for at that moment. Walking such a tightrope was something he never mastered, even though he was aware that others were making a success of it. He was poised somewhere in the background, too much of an innovator to capitulate, too short of money not to hope that small concessions would induce someone to buy something. As it happened, public morals capitulated first, and sooner than he could have imagined. Five years later one of his forbidden nudes was sold at the Salle Drouot in Paris for twenty-two thousand francs.
The writer Francis Carco was an early admirer of Modigliani’s nude canvases. He went to see them one day at 3 rue Joseph Bara in a dark empty room, canvases stacked up around the walls. Zborowski, illuminating each in turn by candlelight, rhapsodized over his treasures, stroking them, lingering over their details, and heaping scorn and vengeance on those unwilling or unable to see their worth. Just that very morning he had offered a dealer fifteen canvases, free, if he would just hang them in his gallery. The wretched man refused.
When Carco asked to buy one Zborowski shouted with joy. He would give the painting to Carco willingly because he loved it. The writer argued in vain. “He came with me to my house, carrying that magnificent picture and refusing even at the very last minute to accept a very small sum which, not being rich, I tried to force upon him.” Zborowski waved the money away. He was about to sell some clothes and expected to raise twenty francs. That would be enough.
Zborowski, Carco wrote, “never doubted Modigliani’s genius for one second. To help him live he would have sold his clothes, his watch, his shoes, slept outdoors in the midst of winter and would have borrowed money from anybody.” The day would come when discriminating collectors would begin buying Modiglianis. “Meanwhile they would not listen to Zborowski, they laughed in his face, or else they did not receive him, offended that anyone should try to mock them in that way. Zborowski did not mind. He would leave the painting, come back, and talk, and talk.”
Zborowski’s refusal to take no for an answer puts one in mind of the great international art dealer Joseph Duveen. He was similarly immune to insults, never lost his sense of humor, and was capable of reducing hard-headed businessmen to such a state that they would buy anything just to get rid of him. Among the collectors Zborowski successfully introduced to Modigliani was Jonas, or Jones, Netter, who represented some of the best-known French manufacturers in an import-export business. Gérard Netter, his son, believed that his father became a sophisticated collector entirely by accident. “One day someone took him to Zborowski’s, somewhere in the outskirts of Paris, and when my father saw two Utrillos and a Modigliani hanging in his salon he bought them immediately. It was a ‘coup de foudre,’ ” Gérard Netter said. “He kept going back to Zborowski’s and ended up buying the whole School of Paris.” Relations between the two men did not always run smoothly. One was inclined to believe this poet and charmer, who had such extraordinary taste, because “he was an extremely attractive, seductive personality who said he was a Polish nobleman (I’m not at all sure he was noble, but he certainly was Polish).” Zborowski turned the full force of his charm on Netter, persuading him to become a financial backer of his enterprise, and kept breaking his contracts, most of which were verbal, at least at first. Gérard Netter recalled one time when Zborowski went to call on his father, and his father, enraged, would not let him in. Then Zborowski said, “Monsieur Netter, I cannot live without you. I love you!” and Jones Netter relented. “That very same day Zborowski began to cheat him again.”
Roger Dutilleul is another major figure, a businessman in cement with the soul of an aesthete whose instinct to buy avant-garde artists began in 1907 when, being young, he had barely any money. Eventually he would own so many works that they were plastered all over the walls, stacked up around the rooms, and under the beds—he lived with his brother, a print collector, and never married. Between 1918 and 1925, thirty-four of Modigliani’s paintings and twenty-one of his drawings went through Dutilleul’s hands.
In a 1948 interview, Dutilleul said that early in his collecting career he bought a painting by Braque from Berthe Weill for a hundred francs. But most of all, he visited Picasso’s agent, Kahnweiler, who had opened a boutique when he was just twenty-one. “Sensitive and intelligent, he and I would have long conversations and he encouraged me in my emerging tastes. He was the one who introduced me to Picasso, Gris and Marcoussis. In effect, I became his disciple.” Kahnweiler wrote that Dutilleul was “(t)he quintessential French haut bourgeois, very enlightened, very fastidious, belonging to a vanished era but profoundly sympathetic.
In those days, Dutilleul continued, anyone in Paris with a bit of taste and flair could find bargains. That is how I came to add drawings by Daumier and Corot to my collection, which were an even better buy than contemporary works; just before the war I bought a study by Corot, unsigned, for 175 francs. And I found a very pretty little ceramic piece by Rouault on the quays for thirty francs.
My contacts with Modigliani began in the same way. I had seen one or two of his paintings in the window of Paul Guillaume’s and a bit later, visiting the gallery Lepoutre, I was offered one of his canvases for a hundred francs, which I accepted enthusiastically. I bought a great many from Zborowski, right up to the day when, having nothing to sell, he suggested that Modigliani paint my portrait. [In 1918] I accepted with some reservations and Modigliani came to see me. As he stood looking at my canvasses by Picasso and Braque, he was agonized. He said, “I am ten years behind them,” and I had a lot of trouble convincing him this was not so.
He finished the painting in three weeks, very glad not to have to go looking for a model. I paid Zborowski five hundred francs. He divided the sum into five parts, three for him and his numerous relations, one for his associate and, finally, one [a hundred francs] for the painter!
Nevertheless one has to recognize that dealers did this generation of painters an enormous service. I saw my first Chagall at Berthe Weill’s; my Légers at Rosenberg’s. Dealers smoothed our path, helped educate our tastes and also, one forgets how many financial risks they took, what kind of investment they had in hundreds of pictures in their storerooms.
I have lived now for many years with this collection from which I was never parted and which I have succeeded in enriching a little. The experience has taught me how much painting, especially at difficult moments of my life, and in the silence of an empty room, can be an inspiration, an escape.
In the days when Zborowski was trying to support both Modigliani and Soutine he was often reduced to selling whatever he could lay his hands on, as was attested to by Lunia Czechowska, one of the few reliable observers of Modigliani’s last years. In a lengthy account written in 1958 she recalled that, when her husband was drafted, she moved in with Hanka and Zbo on the rue Joseph Bara. She therefore saw at first hand their daily struggles to make ends meet and took part herself. Since she almost certainly knew of Modigliani’s illness, Zbo would have known of it himself. This might explain the heroic efforts the dealer undertook to keep him in funds and under daily surveillance in his own dining room.
As for Jeanne Hébuterne there is no way of knowing whether she had guessed, or been told, that Modigliani was consumptive. But given her ability to keep secrets one can safely assume she would never have revealed a fact he was at such pains to conceal himself. She would have deferred to him in any event as her mentor and lover. Indenbaum, who was interviewed by John Olliver for Pierre Sichel’s biography, said, “Modi was just everything to her: father, brother, husband, fiancé…Modi with his arm around Jeanne’s shoulders is a typical scene: he protected her, she felt ‘à l’abri,’ sheltered in his arms, and just looked up at him in a silent and ecstatic worship.” Indenbaum recalled one evening, around two a.m., when Modigliani had thrown the usual chairs and wineglasses around at a café. “Well, after such a row he would find himself on the sidewalk, and would go to a bench and sit down. Jeanne would then come, sit next to him and Modi would put his arm around her shoulders. And they would stay sitting like that for hours, without a word.”
Indenbaum said that Modigliani never received friends at the rue de la Grande Chaumière. “Not that he refused to do so, but one just didn’t go ‘chez Modigliani.’ ” There are no clues to their life together but plenty of insights into the way they lived, thanks to Jeanne. Restellini wrote, “Just as Modigliani’s art does not ever reflect a single concrete reality and is situated in a kind of time vacuum, that of Jeanne, on the other hand, reflects their daily reality in quite a feminine way. The life of the couple is seen through her drawings … the surroundings in the studio, the objects standing on the table.” In one of them a drawing hangs in a frame. It is a young man with strongly marked eyebrows; could it be Dedo? There is a china bowl and pitcher on the washstand, a candelabra against the wall, a pair of gloves thrown on a table which, one notes, is covered by that bourgeois nicety, the tablecloth. Such details point to an instinct to record these humble cherished objects, to frame and capture the kind of emotion Des Grieux describes in his aria, “Adieu, notre petite table,” in Massenet’s Manon. Wherever she looked, Jeanne found subject matter for her quietly observant eye. One of her best paintings, a gouache on cardboard, shows her mother sitting before an open window. Her mother is resplendent in a yellowish-green kimono bordered with bright orange flowers. Her figure, outlined in mauve, reflects a bold background in mauve and violet. Similar adept and unexpected color choices enliven three of her early still lifes and must have been one of the reasons why Modigliani found her interesting: her talent is evident. She also had gifts as a delineator, making unsparing self-portraits and repeated studies of her parents and brother André on his military leaves. Her confident line is reminiscent of Modigliani’s, with some Cubistic flourishes of her own; her paintings, never merely pretty, indicate her strength of personality. Her style is one she would have learned at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, that is to say, that of the Nabis, a late-nineteenth-century group of artists who followed Gauguin’s use of heightened colors and drastically simplified forms. How she would have developed from a young woman of promise to an artist of maturity and individuality is one of the great unanswered questions.
However, in recent years Jeanne Hébuterne’s work has sold for handsome sums. In May 2009 two of her drawings: a self portrait, and one of Modigliani sporting a pipe, each sold at Christie’s in Paris for more than $17,000. Another drawing, this one of Jeanne by Modigliani, now in the possession of the Hébuterne Archive, sold at the same sale for $132,296. The previous December, Hébuterne’s painting of Chaim Soutine also sold at Christie’s in Paris for the surprising sum of $92,367. In the space of six months, December 2008 to May 2009, Hébuterne’s archives realized a gross of $258,759.
In March 1918 the war again intruded on Modigliani’s world with sudden and dramatic force. The Germans had invented an enormous cannon, called “Big Bertha,” capable of sending missiles the (then preposterous) distance of 121 kilometers, or seventy-five miles. Restellini writes that two of these monstrous machines were trained on the center of Paris, specifically the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité. There is no proof that Big Bertha’s aim was ever that accurate, but no doubt that shells reached Paris. On March 23 the first round was fired at seven a.m. and fell on the Place de la République, which was central enough. Fifteen minutes later another immense shell hit the rue Charles V, then a third outside the Gare de l’Est. Another shell would hit the church of Saint-Gervais in the Marais (fourth arrondissement); the roof fell in and at least fifty people died. Before the war’s end more than 250 Parisians had been killed and another six hundred injured. A new and frightening phase had begun.
The shelling was the prelude to a German offensive. A peace treaty had been signed with Russia and troops released from the eastern front were massing against the French lines; it was a repeat of the 1914 invasion scare. There was a third, grave danger on the horizon in the form of a particularly virulent and devastating form of influenza. Misnamed the Spanish flu, it began in the U.S. in an Army camp in Kansas that same month, March 1918. American troops brought it to Europe, and by the autumn of 1918 it had mutated into a lethal form, rivaling the Black Death in its pestilential advance. In the Paris region alone it would kill thirty thousand people; worldwide, eventually thirty million died.
Although the really severe period of the epidemic was yet to come, the immediate danger was bad enough. Zborowski was determined to get Modigliani out of Paris. Restellini writes that Jones Netter provided the funds to take Zborowski, Hanka, Modigliani, and a group of friends that included Soutine and Foujita, to safety, that is to say, Nice and Cannes.
Throughout the nineteenth century the worst thing an unmarried girl from a respectable family could do was to get pregnant. “Illegitimacy was scandalous,” Michelle Perrot wrote, “for it was the visible sign of an offense against virginity … hence a threat to the social order. The guilty woman and those closest to her thought of nothing but hiding the offense … Mothers often abetted their daughters in infanticide. Frequently a neighbor or even a household member would denounce the crime. Sometimes a persistent rumor was enough to attract the attention of mayor and gendarmes.” So when Eudoxie learned of Jeanne’s pregnancy her shock and horror may be taken as read. One can imagine her immediate response: the couple must marry immediately.
On the other hand, was a penniless Italian artist sixteen years Jeanne’s senior quite the right person? She and her husband could hardly object to his being an artist, since their own son was on his way to becoming one, assuming that he survived the war. But they surely would have wanted someone more suitable in age and background, and, if possible, well off. This was the moment when nine couples out of ten who are madly in love would have married anyway. Curiously, they did not. Was Modigliani, who told Lejeune that he was not cut out for that kind of role, full of inner doubt? Was Jeanne’s mother convinced that her husband would never accept him as a son-in-law? What role, if any, did his Jewishness play, given that this was a devout Catholic family? Did Eudoxie find out about his illness? If so, was that another secret she kept from her husband?
A photograph of Eudoxie, date unknown, gives the best insight into the feelings she must have been experiencing during this period. Her expression is set into one of chronic anxiety and dread, the kind seen on the face of a woman who is driven out of her mind by the behavior of her children. Coupled with this is her certain knowledge that she will be blamed and judged by her husband, not to mention her son. There was the prospect of telling Achille the awful news. At that point, the arrival of Big Bertha and the threatened German advance began to look like the best possible pretext to mother and daughter. They would not tell anybody. They would just leave; everyone else was leaving, after all. She would have the baby, give it up for adoption, and no one need be any the wiser. If that is what they thought. A month later, by April 23, 1918, they were in the south of France. They were gone for a year.
As for Modigliani the last few years had taken a toll, physically and emotionally. Zadkine, who was discharged from military service in December 1917, around the time of the Berthe Weill show, met Modigliani soon after his return to Paris. “He was thin and emaciated and could no longer take much alcohol—one glass was enough to make him drunk. But he continued to sit with friends at the table and draw. Occasionally he sang in a hoarse voice; he could hardly get his breath.” For years he had been having difficulty with his teeth, something Paul Alexandre had known about years before, one of the many debilitating consequences of tuberculosis; eventually he would lose them all. But now his energy was leaving him and Zborowski was deeply concerned. A photograph taken in Nice that summer of 1918 shows a rapidly aging man with a receding hairline and deep shadows under his eyes.
John Olliver conducted a long and penetrating interview with Léopold Survage—who was already in Nice when Modigliani arrived—noting that the latter served as consultant, drinking companion, and wiser friend. They worked together every day in Survage’s small, two-room apartment, Survage in one room and Modigliani in the other. Modigliani was often invited to dinner. According to Germaine Survage, who sat for her portrait, one of their rooms was “literally wallpapered with Modigliani’s pictures that Zborowski had lent us, hoping we could help sell them.” Her brother-in-law managed to sell one for fifty francs. They bought another which, some years later, they sold for twelve thousand francs.
In the summer of 1918 Modigliani had a bad case of the flu—whether or not it was the Spanish variety is not clear—and was not painting much, according to Survage. Although committed to four paintings a month he was seldom able to manage more than three. He would paint a canvas during a two- or three-hour stretch, after which his energies would be exhausted. As Marc Restellini notes, some of them have the appearance of being turned out by rote but there are several examples of his best work; one, Léopold Zborowski in Cannes that was bought by Dutilleul, a portrait of a Zouave and several portraits of Jeanne Hébuterne, with her direct gaze and mass of reddish-brown hair.
Modigliani in Cannes in 1918, with Zborowski behind him, and his host, Osterlind, in the background. Osterlind’s sister is seated. (image credit 12.3)
Survage stated that Modigliani always brought a bottle of marc with him, a kind of brandy made from the residue of olives, grapes, or apples. After awhile, he would begin reaching for the bottle. “He worked with spirit, in fact even with rage, spending a lot of physical energy. And so at the end he was usually quite tight.” Olliver added, “Survage told him he should paint landscapes and in fact he did two landscapes … The point of this was that, in Nice, it was difficult to find models. But Modi was not interested; he saw nothing in landscapes.”
Zborowski, who returned to Paris after a short stay to try to sell some more paintings, sent him a monthly stipend of about six hundred francs, considered a handsome sum. But as soon as the money arrived Modigliani and Soutine would go off to the avenue de la Gare in Nice and start drinking. “And when he drank it took him like a madness: he used to throw his money to the soldiers, and there were always soldiers on leave in the cafés. After a few days of this, he was broke.”
On one famous occasion Modigliani wrote to Zborowski with the news that his wallet had been stolen and he had lost his month’s allowance. Somebody’s wallet had been stolen, but it was not his. He and Survage were walking along the avenue de la Gare one day when they fell into conversation with a group of soldiers, including some Arabs. The next thing they knew, a wallet was gone—belonging to Survage. Survage was always puzzled about that.
On another occasion Guillaume arrived in Nice. He had brought a collection of engravings which he intended to present to Renoir in the hope the great man would take him on as a dealer. In that he was not successful, but he did go for a walk along the Promenade des Anglais and he and Modigliani, along with a woman friend, were photographed by one of the commercial photographers who could always be found there. When they met again the next day Guillaume asked Modigliani to reimburse him for the pictures, which infuriated the artist. Survage commented that this penny-pinching side of Guillaume’s was one of the reasons why “they did not get on very well.”
Modigliani, at right, on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, accompanied by Paul Guillaume and, possibly, the wife of the sculptor Alexander Archipenko (image credit 12.4)
Survage was always concerned about Modigliani’s drinking and, in an effort to stop him, told him he was an alcoholic. Modigliani reacted with indignation, but for three days he drank nothing. On the fourth, he rolled in, completely drunk. Survage, trying to get him to see reason, persuaded him to make the arduous walk to Villefranche, a village along the coast, which Modigliani did. They had a delicious dinner and drank a moderate amount of wine. Whether the lesson had the intended effect is not recorded.
Modigliani, Jeanne, and Eudoxie first took an apartment together on the rue Masséna. The author of Le Silence éternel, the companion volume for the exhibition “Le Couple Tragique,” believes that Modigliani and his future mother-in-law began on the best of terms. A drawing, by Modigliani and Hébuterne, along with a watercolor by her, takes the theme of lovers in a garden, and at lunch, watched over by her mother. This idyllic scene did not last long, if we are to believe Jeanne Modigliani, who was scrupulous in such matters. She writes that Amedeo then moved into the first in a series of hotels, the Tarelli, on the rue de France. According to Survage, he was not there long, but kept moving, using his time-honored, fail-safe method of avoiding a bill by making so much noise that he was evicted. Modigliani moved because, according to Jeanne Modigliani, “relations between [him] and [Eudoxie] became more and more strained.” It seems likely, even inevitable, that, given all that had happened and all the secrets she had been forced to hide, Eudoxie would have expressed anger and frustration at what she would have considered a major family crisis. In any event Survage claimed that not only did he himself see little of Jeanne, but that at one time Modigliani also saw her rarely. “He took a coffee with her and then put her on the tram so she could go back to her mother. He never saw the mother.” The explanation for that was simple, according to Survage. For Modigliani everything was secondary to his art, even Hébuterne. “He had no other attachment.”
The military threat to Paris was slowly receding. The Germans won two battles in April against the British and the French, which were followed by a French counterattack in July, and in August the British broke through the German lines. Paris must have looked safer and safer but Jeanne and her mother stayed on in the south. André, just twenty when the war started, joined the infantry, was wounded, was decorated twice, and kept a war diary. From it Marc Restellini was able to chart his leaves home. On one of those visits, in October 1917, when Jeanne was already secretly living with Modigliani, André makes no mention of the fact, a sign that he was as unaware of the true nature of affairs as his parents. However, when his next leave came, in the summer of 1918, he went directly to Nice, but Jeanne was nowhere to be found, which naturally upset him very much. As for the coming birth, that, too, was a closely guarded secret.
René Gimpel, whose Diary of an Art Dealer begins in 1918, was out on the Paris streets the day of the Armistice, November 11. “The crowd had doubled; incredibly, the joy had multiplied a hundredfold,” he wrote a day later. “Women were going wild but keeping their heads. I did not see a single drunk. Kissing, much kissing, but only a birds-of-passage sort of thing. The American soldiers are the most feted.” Baby Jeanne, Jeanne Hébuterne and Amedeo Modigliani’s firstborn, was on the point of entering the world. Yet little about the circumstances surrounding her arrival is clear. Lunia Czechowska states that Modigliani returned to Paris in the summer before she was born, which would suggest that he was not in Nice for the birth. But from other details it is clear that the usually reliable guide is off by a year. Artist Quarter, misleading in this as in much else, claims that Eudoxie, in a fit of final exasperation at Jeanne and her fiancé, slammed the door on both and took up residence alone in the “California” area of Nice. Whereas Jeanne Modigliani has established that her father was long gone. Furthermore the address given for Jeanne Hébuterne on her baby’s birth certificate is 155 avenue de la Californie; obviously, she and her mother were living there together.
Artist Quarter also tells a story, repeated by Sichel, that on the night little Jeanne was born her father, ecstatic, rushed out of the hospital on his way to the Mairie. But somehow he had to have a drink first and never got there. When he thought of it again, it was too late, and the next day he forgot.
It makes a good story, one more nail in the coffin of this feckless drunk who cannot even manage to register his own daughter’s birth. The truth is otherwise. Contrary to published statements a birth certificate does exist. It was issued three days later, on December 2, 1918, in the presence of the baby herself. She was taken to the town hall by a nurse, Rose Villars, who provided the necessary information. This same document was carefully annotated for decades and charts the future legal and marital status of the little girl who, for the moment, was simply “Jeanne,” the daughter of Jeanne Hébuterne.
So much speculation and outright invention has grown up around the Hébuterne story that even today, details are sparse, and if further amplification does exist it is closely guarded. What is known is that André went to Nice as soon as he could, arriving on December 16, 1918. Only then did he discover that his unmarried sister had given birth two weeks before. “He saw that as proof”—of her disloyalty?—“and did not hide his anger,” Restellini wrote. One can imagine what this confrontation with her brother did to Jeanne’s state of mind. What was said: That she had brought shame and dishonor on her family? That she had committed a crime? How could she choose between her brother and her lover? As for her mother, the collapse of her plan to avoid having her husband find out must have been a crushing blow. What seemed to have upset André particularly was that he was the one who had to write to tell his father about the birth. The lengths both women went to in order to avoid a confrontation speaks volumes about their fear of what would happen if the truth were known. After the men found out anyway the uproar went on for months. A trust had been broken that never would be restored. Restellini reported, based on André’s diary, that relations between brother and sister continued to deteriorate, reaching their nadir during four days at the end of April 1919. Was he physically violent? Was Jeanne told, as rumor has claimed, that her family wanted nothing more to do with her? Luc Prunet said that for the rest of his life his grandfather “would close up like an oyster” whenever the subject of Jeanne was mentioned. Perhaps he felt that too much had been said already. “But he also told me, ‘If I had been there at the time this never would have happened.’ ”