The Cult of the Secret
Life never presents us with anything which may not be looked upon as a fresh starting point, no less than as a termination.
—ANDRÉ GIDE, The Counterfeiters
ONE OF Modigliani’s many paintings of Jeanne Hébuterne reproduced in Le Silence éternel dates from their last months together. She is sitting on a stool in front of a door in a corner of the room. Her swollen stomach is hidden under an opaque black skirt and a kind of scarf or stole is wrapped around her shoulders. The theme is heavily red, from the vivid crimson of the bodice to the vermilion wall paint and door to the reddish browns of the wooden stool and blackish browns of the floor. Her skin tones, which are pinkish in earlier paintings, have been drained into a sallow, uniform yellow. The boldly stressed silhouette, annotated in black, gives a feeling of foreboding, even menace, to what should have been an occasion to celebrate by the father-to-be. However, if one theorizes that perhaps Modigliani is making a reference to the idea of alchemical transformation the painting, far from being an anomaly, takes on an interesting new dimension. It can be read as a clue to unlock the mystery of Jeanne Hébuterne’s death.
In alchemical symbolism the colors red and black signify stages in the process of transfiguration. Joseph Campbell writes, “Black is the color of the first stage, the nigredo, in which the substance to be transformed must first be broken down into a prima materia, or primordial mass … Red, on the other hand, signifies the third stage, the rubedo, or reddening, which is the spiritual goal of the entire alchemical opus: gold is produced as the direct product of the fusion of the opposites sulfur and mercury, or Sol and Luna.” It is tempting to think that Modigliani had convinced Jeanne that death was as easy as walking through a door and that it would lead to their reunion in a higher sphere. Ortiz de Zárate writes that after Modigliani died he went to see Jeanne, who said calmly, “Oh! I know that he’s dead. But I also know that he’ll soon be living for me.” If there was a secret pact one would expect each of them to have left a coded message, and they did. Modigliani’s portrait, as read symbolically with a door behind it, would seem to suggest death and rebirth. Hers is full of significantly similar color symbolism and only the message differs slightly. The watercolors by Jeanne which Chantal Quenneville said she found when she went to the apartment after Jeanne’s death have recently been made public, thanks to Luc Prunet. These are four lightly sketched works telling the story in comic-book sequence. But their purpose is anything but frivolous; Restellini calls them Hébuterne’s last will and testament.
The first is a drawing of an interior. A table covered with a blue cloth stands before a fireplace with a mirror above it. There is an empty wine decanter on the table, a glass, and in recognition of one of Jeanne’s major interests, a volume of sheet music labeled “Les Chansons.” Restellini believes the watercolor describes the Hébuterne apartment at the moment when Jeanne and Modigliani met. André has left for the war, and there is a tiny but unmistakable picture of him in uniform on the mantelpiece. Restellini finds death foreshadowed in the fact that the clock is painted black and the inky fireplace opening is reflected, in miniature, on the wine decanter’s surface. The colors are, however, pretty pastels: blue, apple-green, gold, and off-white.
The second watercolor recalls their stay in Nice with Eudoxie. It could be lunchtime. The couple are seated at a table facing the viewer; Eudoxie, in profile, sits opposite. The color scheme includes blues and blueish greens, but red has entered the theme in the form of a skirt, red wine, some background flowers, and her mother’s reddish-brown dress. So has black. Modigliani’s jacket and tie are black and the sockets of his eyes are painted black. Her hand is placed protectively over his and to the right of her plate is a black knife. There is even a black-and-white cat at her feet. Presentiment can be no clearer than this; Restellini writes, “[M]ore and more, death is making its presence felt.”
In the third painting a naked girl with long tresses is asleep in a single bed. Her features have been left unpainted but the reference is clear enough, as is the figure all in black that stands at the open doorway. It could represent Maldoror or perhaps a priest, or simply a personification of Death. The themes of black and red, in the visitor’s clothing, the mat on the floor, and the crimson towel hanging over the door, make the meaning clear. In the fourth and final frame the heroine, on her red bed and white sheets, having thrust a dagger into her heart, lies head downward, her russet hair streaming behind her. The dripping dagger, the scarlet skirt, the vermilion blood, even her necklace and bracelet, repeat the overwhelming theme. Only the skirt that covers her unborn child retains its traces of green, hemmed around in black. Her intentions could not be more specific. The only issue left was exactly how and when.
As luck would have it Stanislas Fumet and his wife passed “Jeannette” on the street very shortly after Modigliani died. “We were on our way back home to our apartment in the rue Gay-Lussac that Sunday evening,” he wrote. “We were just going down the rue Pierre-Curie when we saw, at a distance, Jeannette on her father’s arm heading towards us. We had only just learned about Modigliani’s death that morning. Jeannette, heavily pregnant, was moving slowly, like a somnambulist, her eyes glassy. My wife made a move to embrace her but she changed her mind as she realized that Jeanne did not even see her. Her father came over to us and said quietly, ‘You know, Modigliani is dead …’ Jeannette kept on walking and he caught up with her.”
Fumet and his wife stopped for a moment to watch them disappear. Jeannette and her father were returning from the hospital, where, after a search, she had found Amedeo, he wrote. “Her father had not wanted to go into the room where he was lying. Two witnesses, friends of Modi, were already there. They told us that they saw Jeannette bend over his face, looking at him intently for a long time without saying a word, as if her eyes were reliving each moment of his suffering. Then she backed away, still looking at him until she reached the door. We concluded that she was holding onto that image of him and refusing to see anything else … We were the last ‘strangers’ she saw.”
The Saturday night that Modigliani died, rather than have her return to the rue de la Grande Chaumière alone, Zborowski found her a small hotel room on the rue de Seine. The night of Sunday, January 25, when the Fumets met her she was returning to sleep at her parents’ apartment on the rue Amyot. The four watercolors were discovered later in the studio she had shared with Dedo. How concerned the Hébuternes were about their daughter’s emotional state is not clear. In one version, they took her home because they feared she was suicidal. In another version there is no indication that they had such concerns. If they had not yet seen the drawings they might not have appreciated the depths of her despair.
Several recent studies of suicide make the point that a successful suicide requires not just the will but the means and the opportunity. It is a statistical fact that states with high rates of gun ownership have suicide rates that are more than double the rates in parts of the country where gun ownership is low. In a fascinating article Scott Anderson describes how the phasing out of coal gas in Britain had a direct bearing on the suicide rate. Unburned coal gas releases very high levels of carbon monoxide, and an open valve in a closed space induces asphyxiation in a matter of minutes. “Sticking your head in the oven” became the preferred method of suicide in Britain until the 1970s and the arrival of natural gas, which does not release carbon monoxide.
As a result the national suicide rate dropped by nearly a third. Dying was no longer as easy or convenient. Once the immediate means were no longer available, the nature of the act itself became clearer.
Richard Seiden, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, traced the history of would-be suicides who had been stopped by the police from jumping off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. He found that a mere 6 percent went on to kill themselves at a later date. Seiden believed the key to understanding the phenomenon was the role played by impulse. “They were having an acute temporary crisis, they passed through it and, coming out on the other side, they got on with their lives.” A psychiatrist who had interviewed nine people who had made the leap and survived, commented, “[N]one of them had truly wanted to die. They wanted their inner pain to stop; they wanted some measure of relief; and this was the only answer they could find. They were in spiritual agony, and they sought a physical solution.”
Although Jeanne had wanted to die she could, nevertheless, have been the victim of a momentary impulse that night in her parents’ home. She could have thought, as one survivor commented of his leap from the bridge, “It’s watching my hands come off that railing and thinking to myself, ‘My God, what have I just done?’…All of a sudden [I] didn’t want to die, but it was too late.” At three a.m. the following morning Jeanne found the means and opportunity. She opened the windows of her sixth-floor bedroom and jumped to her death.
Because of the Hébuternes’ staunch determination to keep their private tragedy private, what happened next has never been explained, and now André, the one person who might have cleared up the mystery, has died.
Some accounts state that André was in her bedroom watching over her, that she waited until he nodded off and then jumped. If so he would certainly have awakened when the window banged open. It was January. There would have been a sudden blast of cold air and a thump. Tradition has it that a workman in the street below found the body and loaded it onto a wheelbarrow, not her brother. Jeanne Modigliani’s cautious account makes no mention of André at all. If André had not been watching over his sister it would be reason for him to feel such pain and self-reproach that he would never want to talk about it. He was not the only person grievously wounded that night. As William Maxwell wrote, “The suicide doesn’t go alone; he takes everybody with him.”
There are obvious inconsistencies in the version of what happened next. The accepted account has the workman taking the dead girl to the sixth floor, where the Hébuternes slammed the door in his face. Leaving aside the question of slamming doors, that any workman made it up six flights with a wheelbarrow containing a dead body is very unlikely. Even if the rue Amyot apartment building had an elevator it was also unlikely to have held more than two people at its most capacious, given the times. That there was any such confrontation can be confidently discounted.
Second, a death notice first had to be filed in the appropriate town hall, in this case the sixth arrondissement. Then the family had to wait for the coroner’s arrival to obtain a burial permit. Funeral arrangements came last. Assuming that Jeanne Hébuterne died at three a.m., there was at least a six-hour interval before the town hall offices were open and her death could be recorded.
Perhaps the concierge was taken into the family’s confidence and sheltered the body somewhere on the ground floor. Secrecy would have been vital to the Catholic Hébuternes, whose shame at their unmarried daughter was now compounded because suicide was a sin in the eyes of their church. And to kill a full-term baby has always been a crime. In their horror and grief, one thought would have been uppermost. Somehow, they had to keep it quiet.
The death certificate was issued in the sixth arrondissement at nine that morning. It was based on information provided by two employees of 59 rue Bonaparte. As it turned out, this was the address of Charles Daude, the funeral home that was, at that very moment, planning Modigliani’s funeral. This led to the logical assumption that André Hébuterne had contacted, first Zborowski, then Charles Daude’s establishment, before the town hall opened. Two men and a handcart were then dispatched to the rue Amyot to transport the body. This, then, is the probable origin of the legend citing a laborer with a wheelbarrow. The two men declared the death and conveyed the pertinent details. The same information then had to be recorded in the town hall where Jeanne lived, in the fifth arrondissement. This took place at two that afternoon. By the time these formalities were concluded, Jeanne had been moved to the rue de la Grande Chaumière and could be visited at the right psychic and literal distance.
Repulsing the suggestion that Jeanne be buried with Modigliani, the Hébuternes took her body to the distant cemetery of Bagneux two or three days later. The ceremony was held at eight in the morning and they begged people not to come, but a few did anyway. Chantal Quenneville and a friend, Jeanne Léger, were the first to arrive at the apartment on the rue de la Grande Chaumière, where Jeanne’s body lay under a coarse coverlet. While Jeanne Léger went looking for a nurse to dress the body Chantal did what she could to tidy and sweep up the studio. There was a box of charcoal, there were empty bottles of preserves, presumably fruit and vegetables, wine bottles littered about, and a general air of desolation. Most of all there was Jeanne, her skin dead white, curiously patched with greenish stains, her stomach bulging under its loose coverlet, and one leg seemed to have been broken by the fall. The portrait of Varvogli, unfinished, still stood on an easel. Much has been made of the fact that the concierge refused to accept the body at first, on the grounds that Jeanne was not the actual tenant, but was overruled. It may be true. Many years later the daughter of Ortiz de Zárate recalled returning from school and finding the concierge in hysterics. It seems that, as Jeanne’s body was being carried up the endless flights of stairs, some of her brains spilled onto the floor.
The sad irony of Modigliani’s death just as he was becoming recognized, the ostentation of his burial, and its tragic sequel seemed to be taken by everyone as a personal reproach. Some who knew the truth about his health could have consoled themselves, knowing that death, in any case, could not have been far off. What no one could have foreseen was that this quiet, self-effacing girl had been driven to kill herself and take her baby with her. The event took on the dimensions of a Greek tragedy. If they could have done something to help Modigliani they certainly should have anticipated this, and now she had repaid them for their indifference; “every suicide is perhaps a repressed assassination,” as Gustave Flaubert commented. Feelings of guilt and remorse are inevitable, to be buried beneath a desire to deny and forget.
Lunia Czechowska returned to Paris in September 1920. While she was away Zbo wrote often enough and claimed that Modigliani had returned to Livorno. On arriving she was told that Modigliani had ceased to paint because of poor health. Zbo and Hanka were hoping perhaps that this would satisfy her and they could gradually prepare her for the worst. Somehow Lunia was not convinced and asked the same question from other friends. But they had all rehearsed the same answers. “I was struck by the fact that they seemed to avoid referring to him. I found that bizarre and accused them of having forgotten him”; to which, presumably, there was no reply.
Lunia’s first night back in the rue Joseph Bara was spent sleeping in the dining room, where Modigliani had painted so many masterpieces. That night she had a strange dream. She was in a little park surrounding the spa where she had been staying. It was autumn and the grass was carpeted with chestnut leaves. The park was deserted except for Modigliani, and they were making a leisurely tour of the grounds. He was carrying something that looked like a magazine. At some point he opened it and said, “Look at this, Lunia. They say in here that I’ve died. Don’t you think this is a bit much! I’m not dead. You can see it for yourself.” Just then she saw Jeanne Hébuterne on her way toward them and said, “There’s Jeanne. Let’s call her.” He held her back. “No, no, in a minute.” But she was so pleased to see Jeanne that she called out her name in a loud voice. At that moment she woke herself up.
The adorable baby girl, now an orphan at thirteen months, was somewhere on the outskirts of Paris with her nurse. A letter from that lady, stating that the baby had cut her first tooth and that she herself had not yet been paid, was found after the deaths. One would expect the Hébuternes, the Paris family, to have taken an active part in the baby’s future, but this does not seem to have happened. The one who went to fetch baby Jeanne and pay off her nurse was not her grandmother Eudoxie, but her father’s dealer. Meantime, there was Hanka to help. Where was baby Jeanne going to live? Not with the Hébuternes, apparently.
Fortunately the Modiglianis, now in Florence, wanted her, and the sooner the better. Emanuele would undertake the tedious formalities involved in getting the baby across the border. In the meantime she was sent to Uncle Albert Garsin in Marseilles, Eugénie’s youngest brother, who was declared her guardian ad interim. Emanuele would come for her as soon as the papers were in order. This seems to have happened in June 1920. She is ours, Emanuele would subsequently write triumphantly.
By now Eugénie was sixty-five, an age her generation would consider old. It would have been reasonable for her not to want the complication of a baby. But apart from losing Dedo she had other reasons for taking in Jeanne just then. Luci, her son Umberto’s baby, had just died of meningitis, and her mother, Ida, could not have any more children. Emanuele was also childless. That summer of 1920 he would be attacked and badly beaten while trying to defend the printing press of a Socialist newspaper. He would bear a large scar on his forehead for the rest of his life. Eugénie’s diary in March of that year describes the period of waiting for baby Jeanne to arrive and hoping to find in her a resemblance to her “dear lost one.”
The baby Jeanne in her Victorian perambulator, aged about fifteen months (image credit 14.1)
Thank heavens for Margherita, who immediately urged her mother to bring the baby to Florence to live with them. Life was worth believing in, after all, Eugénie wrote, when it presented such a moment of consolation and joy. A photograph taken just after the arrival of Nannoli, as she was called, shows a chubby baby with delicate features in a frilly hat, coat, and bib, in her delighted grandmother’s arms.
But the real heroes of Jeanne’s childhood odyssey would be her uncle Emanuele and aunt Vera in Rome. In letters home Emanuele emerges as an enormously helpful figure, always positive and hopeful even as he was fighting a losing battle against Mussolini and his Fascist thugs. His common sense never deserts him even at his worst moments. His warmth, loyalty, and good humor are unfailing. He is sympathetic, funny, even ribald, and wonderfully resourceful.
The first issue, to legitimize Jeanne’s birth, bothered his mother, who kept writing to him about the problem. Although Jeanne’s parents did not marry an acknowledgment of paternity on the father’s side and enough evidence from both directions would legitimize her and she could legally take her father’s name under French and Italian law. Had her father not accepted responsibility no such legal process could have been started. In this case the Hébuternes could point to Modigliani’s signed statement in the summer of 1919 and his frequent assurances that he would marry their daughter. The Modiglianis were more than willing to begin the effort. Eugénie was sure the Hébuternes would not cooperate. But, Emanuele wrote, she was “wrong, wrong, wrong.” That was on March 23 of 1923 and five days later they made a declaration in Paris supporting the project. At the age of three and a half, Jeanne finally became a Modigliani.
The Hébuternes must have devoutly wished that this was the end of the matter, but they had reckoned without Eugénie. She wanted Jeanne moved from her grave in Bagneux and reburied with Dedo at Père Lachaise. This project took rather longer to accomplish but, as before, Eugénie was not an easy person to discourage. Quite when the idea came about is not clear. But assuming that she thought of it soon after Jeanne’s legal status was assured, and if she made the proposal sometime later in 1923, it was at first rejected. One imagines that Achille was the one who resisted. After all, his daughter was a suicide and a baby killer. How could she deserve a place of honor? But in 1925, at the early age of fifty-eight, he died. That left the decision up to Eudoxie and the objections melted away. It was also a help that Emanuele and Vera were exiled to Paris a year later. After Mussolini came to power in 1926, Emanuele’s life was in danger. He, along with Filippo Turati, the head of the Italian Socialist Party, escaped across the border just in time. Plans moved ahead and by the time he wrote to Eugénie in February 1927, Jeanne had been moved to the Père Lachaise and was sharing Dedo’s grave. Her memorial, significantly, in Italian, not French, reads, “Jeanne Hebuterne, Nata a Parigi il 6 Aprile 1898, Morta a Parigi il 25 Gennaio 1920, Di Amedeo Modigliani Compagna Devota Fina All’ Estremo Sacrifizio.”
A French newspaper photograph of G. E. Modigliani fleeing with Turati, chief of the Italian Socialist Party, after Mussolini came to power, 1926 (image credit 14.2)
“There is still some masonry work to be done,” Emanuele wrote. “But there are some well-tended plants that bloom for weeks and also … a bunch of violets placed there by someone. One of the thousands of signs of the cult that has formed in his memory.” He had just read, with considerable admiration, a new book about Modigliani’s life. It was written “without the usual idiocy.” He would keep the book for Nannoli to read once she was old enough to understand and would “pardon her maternal grandparents for their lack of understanding in the face of tragedy.” The author had noted this fact in a brief sentence but, he added, “correctly.”
It is likely that Eugénie never saw the grave, and she died in Florence six months later.
Another orphan, this time a boy, was not so lucky. When he visited Paris in the summer of 1920 Emanuele met Simone Thiroux and her son Gérard, a bright and lively three-year-old. Jeanne Modigliani was always told he was “much prettier than she was.” She said that Emanuele almost took Gérard to Italy with him and always regretted that he had not. He did not, because Dedo had never mentioned Simone or the baby in letters home. No doubt Emanuele was even sadder when he learned the following year that Simone had died of tuberculosis. Gérard, now aged four, was at first cared for by two of Simone’s friends and then put up for adoption. He spent years in an orphanage before being adopted by the Carlinots, a childless couple, in June of 1931. His adoptive father, who at the time was running a small business in cardboard boxes in the rue Réaumur, had been a government employee in the colonial administration in Indochina. The couple apparently divorced within months of adopting Gérard, because his new father soon left for Indochina, taking the boy with him. Once there Gérard was unhappy and smuggled himself onto a boat back to Paris, where he went to live with his new mother. She told him then who his real father was, but he made no effort to contact the Modiglianis or lay claim to that name. Conflicting stories about his fate circulated for years. He was finally discovered by a reporter for a Paris newspaper in 1981. He had taken the name of Thiroux-Villette and was curé of a little church in Milly-la-Forêt. By then he was sixty-four, portly, wearing glasses, gray-haired, and, by his own admission, with no artistic talent whatsoever.
For the first seven years of her life Jeanne Modigliani’s principal caregiver was her grandmother Eugénie. “She was divine. A great beauty,” Jeanne told an interviewer for the French magazine Elle in 1958. “Gifted for everything. She was the lackey [nègre] of a bad writer for whom she wrote novels and she also published a very good study on Goldoni … A truly grande dame of the nineteenth century, with her gray eyes, her queenly carriage, and her white headbands under a black or white mantilla. I kept the little heart-shaped ornament in sandalwood that she always wore between her breasts.”
Eugénie Modigliani at Carlsbad, c. 1925 (image credit 14.3)
After Eugénie died, Aunt Margherita assumed Jeanne’s care. “Tante Marguerite was a large, dried-up lady who taught French. Violent, passionate, she took to wearing the enormous, flat-heeled shoes of the suffragettes and carried a cane. She was so difficult, when my father was living in Paris, that grandmother had to hide from her that she was sending him money. Tante Marguerite was furious at the idea that she was working to keep ‘that scoundrel of an artist’ alive.” It seems clear that Margherita genuinely loved her small niece but could not resist a close supervision in order to nip in the bud whatever she might discover in the way of her brother’s irresponsibility and selfishness, as she saw it. As she grew older Jeanne found such supervision intolerable. She even called her a sadist, and escaped as soon as she could. Uncle Mené and Aunt Vera had taken up residence in Paris at 8 boulevard Ornano in the eighteenth arrondissement, so as soon as she was twenty, in 1939, she joined them there. She was studying to become an art historian and had ambitions to write her father’s biography, but her timing was unfortunate, to say the least. Within months Emanuele and Vera had escaped to Switzerland. Jeanne might well have joined them there, but instead moved to the Vichy area of France. She had married Mario Cesare Silvio Levi, an Italian economist and journalist on the run from Fascist Italy. Jeanne’s daughter Anne believed it was a marriage of convenience but other friends doubt that this was the case, at least at first. The consensus is that it was a genuine love affair.
Like her husband, Jeanne was fluent in French and Italian. She had her father’s green-flecked eyes and her mother’s lustrous, heavy brown hair with its gleaming red and gold highlights. She was also tiny, barely five feet tall, though perhaps an inch taller than her mother, with a narrow nose, tiny hands and feet, and a long neck. According to Jean-Pierre Haillus, for whom she was almost an aunt, she missed her calling. She should never have taken up art. She was born for the theatre, a “cabotine,” strolling player, full of panache. “She was very droll and amusing, with a wonderful sense of humor and she had this amazing voice, with a slight Italian accent. ‘Mon coco!’ she would say.”
She had these large theatrical gestures and an original way of dressing. Haillus recalled one occasion when he was asked to accompany her to the train station in Marseille. Arriving there they joined the queue to buy tickets. While they were waiting she saw a hippie, looking as if he had spent the night in a ditch. She regarded him with awe. “Isn’t he beautiful!” she exclaimed. Arriving at the ticket window she was asked where she wanted to go. “Listen, monsieur,” she replied in her compelling voice, “give me a ticket for some country that’s civilized!”
Jeanne Modigliani in Paris aged thirty-five, 1953 (image credit 14.4)
Dominique Desanti, the historian and novelist who met her just after World War II, said that Jeanne had to invent a memory of her parents whom she lost when she was too young. “Evidently she had a great deal of trouble forming a personality. Why? Because she had invented a myth of Amedeo and Jeanne, and in this history she could not see a place for herself.”
Put another way, Jeanne’s genuine pride in one parent had to be shadowed by her awareness of his reputation as dissolute and self-destructive. As for the other, the taint of a suicide compounded the image of a mother who had abandoned one child and died with another. Who were they really? She was doomed to see them through other people’s eyes and in a chaos of contradictory impressions. Nothing was certain for someone who had compelling needs for a faith she could depend upon. She found that certainty in Communism, with its convictions about the absolute betterment of mankind and the birth of an idyllic new order. “She deeply believed in this. We all did, for a time,” said Dominique Desanti. It was a short step from belief in a better world to an active role in the Résistance. And if she was looking for a parental figure she found it in the unlikely person of Valdemar “Valdi” Nechtschein, alias Victor Leduc, alias any number of other identities with false papers. He was nothing much to look at: short, fat, soon bald, and with a pair of the coldest blue eyes in the world. Born in Berlin in 1911 of Russian Jewish revolutionaries who emigrated to Paris, Valdi coupled high intelligence and erudition with a ferocious distrust of all authority, a sense of mission, and an infinite capacity to deceive.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, who wrote the preface to a reissue of Valdi’s memoir about his years as a Resistance fighter, Les Tribulations d’un idéologue, met him in 1935, when he was twenty-four. He recalled that it was something to hear Valdi reciting the poetry of Mallarmé by the hour or discoursing learnedly on philosophy and political theory. (He taught until 1940, when the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy government forced him to resign.) Vernant continued that it was also something to see him in the 1930s, already a Communist, wading into a Paris street fight with fists flying, making up in sheer determination what he lacked in height and build. René Glodek, another companion of the Resistance, described him as a “man of great energy and persistence” who was still lashing out even as he was being loaded into a police wagon. More than once he ended up being so badly battered that he had to be hospitalized. Valdi was famous for going out to do battle in the streets wearing a beret well stuffed with newspapers so as to cushion the blows from the policemen’s batons.
By the time Jeanne and he met, Valdi had moved to Toulouse and joined Vernant’s underground network. Vernant had formed a successful Resistance cell that continued until the end of the war. All the while he acted as a professor of Greek studies in Toulouse (he never missed a day of teaching) and was never betrayed. Glodek described it as a “secret army” soon joined by Levi and Jeanne, who he thinks knew Vernant in Paris before the war. They were a tight little group of friends united in their hatred of Germans, acting as liaisons between British intelligence and the Maquis—they would arrange, for instance, for parachute drops of weapons and supplies. Vernant wrote, “In the work of the organization as in the midst of a fight, Valdi showed the same tranquil courage, patient tenacity, never defeated, and utter modesty.”
One can see the attraction for Jeanne of this older man, her senior by eight years, already in a responsible position as editor of an underground newspaper, Action. He was interested in everything: literature, the arts, sciences, philosophy, and the ongoing debate about the future of Marxism. It is fascinating to observe the extent to which she, who never knew her father, chose someone whose inner qualities uncannily resembled his. True, Modigliani, although a Socialist and supporter of Emanuele’s causes, was never politically active. But he and Valdi had the same omnivorous intellectual curiosity, the same love for poetry, the same impulsive ability to jump into the middle of a losing fight, and the same gift for keeping up a false front. Speaking of his Resistance years Valdi wrote, “We were like actors wearing masks,” performing a life-or-death drama in broad daylight before a public that did not know and would not have cared. Modigliani could have said the same.
Valdi was also married to Hélène and had two young sons, Maxime and Alain. In wartime nothing like that stood in the way of people who were deeply in love. Desanti said that the relationship for Jeanne was “determinant, crucial.” As for Valdi, he wrote, “Her rebellion was full of verve. The exuberance of her intelligence, her vivacity, her frankness and her charm bowled me over. I was seduced. Our union, begun in a moment of common danger, lasted for thirty years.”
That a life of high adventure is not only exhilarating but can bring out the very best in people is a truism that applied to Jeanne Modigliani in particular during the German occupation of France. François Vitrani, who became one of Valdi’s pupils, called her a “grande Résistante,” i.e., a model of courage and “unbelievable audacity.” She and Valdi shared, not only the constant fear of being captured and tortured, but missions calling for resourcefulness and the ability to improvise. But the organization Vernant put together had mastered the art of creating forged papers that were persuasive enough to rescue Valdi several times. Similar documents were also used to free Jeanne from prison. She was arrested in October 1943 and released in January 1944. Glodek said, “During the liberation of Paris she was in the middle of things and always fearless.” He recalled one day when they—meaning himself, Valdi, and Jeanne—had a rendez-vous on the Left Bank that required them to walk in front of a heavy German field battery, installed behind fortifications on the Place Saint-Michel. At the least sign of fear or haste the suspicious Germans might have opened fire. But Jeanne was magnificent. “She looked the Germans straight in the eye and calmly crossed the square, just like that,” he said.
Jeanne’s defiance sometimes bordered on recklessness. Jean-Pierre Haillus tells the story about one time, during the German occupation, when she and Valdi happened to enter a restaurant full of members of the Gestapo. Jeanne took in the scene, then ordered from the menu. In a loud voice, she would have some “Résistance soup,” or words to that effect. Valdi kicked her hard under the table and hustled her out of there.
Les Tribulations d’un idéologue, written in 1984 under his alias of Victor Leduc and recently reprinted, is a fascinating account of this French intellectual’s Communist beliefs and his slow disenchantment as the truth about Stalin’s repressive regime became clear. It was written partly to explain to a new generation how someone like himself, so hard to deceive, could have taken up the cause at great personal risk and continued to believe in its tenets until post-Stalinist revelations made such a belief impossible. At the same time it is a kind of admission that life spent in a clandestine world exacts a high personal price. Being with Jeanne on cloak-and-dagger missions during the war was one thing. Setting up life with Jeanne in a Paris apartment was something else. By 1946 Jeanne had divorced Mario Levi but Valdi had gone back to live with his wife. In his memoir he told the story haltingly, with the kind of understatement one would expect. “After the Liberation my family moved to Paris with me. I had not broken my liaison with Jeanne. I suffered very much in this situation because I was very attached to Hélène, I loved my sons … and we were about to have a baby girl to whom I had given my mother’s name of Olga. But I love Jeanne, by whom I also had a daughter, Anne.” What Valdi did not mention was that both babies were born in the same month, May of 1946.
Maxime Nechtschein said that during the war he seldom saw his father and when he did Valdi was always on the run. He was often obliged to lie for him, something he did not like at all. His father never talked about Jeanne, politics, his work in the Resistance, or anything personal. He was “not much of a talker.” However, “he was a very good organizer, very passionate, indefatigable but not practical at all. He had a double life. It was ‘la culte du secret.’ ”
G. E. Modigliani in America, 1935 (image credit 14.5)
Finally, Valdi moved in with Jeanne. Even then he never talked about her, his son said, and Maxime only met her once or twice. Valdi spent his weekends with Hélène and the children, as if he had been away on some secret mission and returned for a brief holiday. That their father had two other children was something Maxime and his brother did not learn for many years.
One of the reasons for Valdi’s decision to move in with Jeanne had to do with the state of Anne’s health. When she was only sixteen months old she had a cerebral hemorrhage that left her partially paralyzed, with brain damage. Years of therapy and operations would follow before she was able to lead a normal life. All this was happening in 1947, which would have been a terrible year for Jeanne for another reason: her uncle Emanuele had died. After leaving Switzerland at the end of the war, he and Vera returned to Italy in triumph. But his health was fragile and he died there in October 1947, a few days before his seventy-sixth birthday. No doubt Jeanne felt overwhelmed; in any event, this was when Valdi moved in.
Ten years later Valdi divorced Hélène and married Jeanne. By then they had a second daughter, Laure, born in 1951. Their father belatedly acknowledged his two illegitimate daughters a year or so before his death in 1993. That would have been in character. Dominique Desanti said, “It is true that the two of them lived only for politics. Militants of that epoch essentially abandoned their children. The best thing was if there was a grandmother on the scene … It was a Bohemian household; they all were. If you wanted to eat, well, you went to a restaurant. Otherwise it was ham and frites or you bought something at a delicatessen. I don’t know if Jeanne ever cooked but I’d be astonished if she did. Of course they were very poor. Communist journalists were very poorly paid, considered working class.”
A rare photograph of Valdi and Jeanne together, postwar, in the countryside with cat (image credit 14.6)
Jean-Pierre Haillus agreed. He recalled one time when he was living in Guadeloupe and Valdi arrived there for a conference. They met at the airport. Valdi was in complete sartorial disarray. Everything was unbuttoned and his sole covering above the waist was an undershirt. “A completely Bohemian lifestyle. Jeanne was capable of leaving the house wearing one red shoe and one blue one. It didn’t bother her at all. Possessions didn’t exist for them. If they had a car it needed repair and wouldn’t run. Their apartments were full of old furniture and covered with dust. Books and magazines all over the place.” At home they often walked around in the nude, in a curious repetition of Modigliani’s fondness for disrobing.
Living with Jeanne meant constant theatrical arguments, “very Italian,” and family crises played out against a chaotic lifestyle in which parents came and went at unpredictable hours. Jeanne was, as it were, all for her husband, with nothing much left for her children, particularly Laure, in an echo of her mother’s attitude. Laure went on to study psychology; her doctoral thesis was the incidence of death among psychotic infants, and also the very rare condition that causes children to mutilate themselves. She is not married and has a daughter, Sarah, now in her twenties. She is unemployed and lives in a working-class quarter of Paris. Haillus believes that Christian Parisot formed a charity and a group of art collectors helps provide for Laure. Her sister Anne, who now lives on a small state pension and is cared for by Haillus, her guardian, does not share in this largesse.
One of the reasons why Emanuele fought for Jeanne’s legal status had to do with her artistic inheritance. Zborowski and Guillaume had the usual financial arrangement: four-fifths of a work’s sale price went to them and one-fifth to the artist or his heirs. Once an artist died it was axiomatic that prices shot up. But when Gerald Reitlinger, author of The Economics of Taste, visited Zborowski’s quarters on the rue Joseph Bara in 1922, the Modigliani works were still modestly priced. He found portrait heads for sale from fifteen to twenty pounds. Half-length portraits went for more, from fifty to sixty pounds, and “two or three life-sized odalisques,” unframed, sat on the floor for about eighty each. These tantalizing, if brief, descriptions of lifesize works reveal aspects of Modigliani’s oeuvre that have since disappeared. The whole stock “might have been worth” about one thousand pounds, Reitlinger wrote. In 1961, when his book was published, Modigliani’s oeuvre was then worth half a million pounds. Reitlinger added, “No modern painter’s works have advanced so fast.”
Emanuele could not have known how quickly Modigliani’s works would become valuable but he was concerned enough to safeguard Jeanne’s legal right to royalties and percentages if any were to be had. What was left to inherit, apart from a few drawings and juvenilia? Quite a bit, as it turned out, in the form of consultant’s fees. In France, the artist’s heirs could legally pronounce on a work’s authenticity. The experts might strenuously disagree, but the family had the last word, and that translated into a tidy percentage.
What was authentic and what was not? Most artists, with an eye on sales, kept a running list of what they did when, and some gave their work an inventory number. Modigliani, that least practical of men, never bothered.
A further complication, before the advent of reliable color reproductions after World War II, was the matter of making stylistic comparisons. Early catalogs are maddening for their laconic entries of Head of Woman, with no dimensions and usually no photographs either, and if there are, they are of poor quality black-and-white. There was the matter of Modigliani’s distinctive style as well. Michael Findlay, director of Acquavella in New York, said, “Modigliani left a body of highly stylized work, an image, a logo. They may look superficially like his work and may not survive close inspection. Nevertheless for a faker this is a dream come true.”
Gil Edelson, cofounder in 1960–61 and retired executive director of the Art Dealers Association in New York, believed that Zborowski had hired people to finish Modigliani’s unfinished works and pass them off as originals. Moïse Kisling’s son Jean was sure his father had been one of them. He stated that both artists had often worked on the same canvas and even, occasionally, signed each other’s work for a joke. Art historians have, however, expressed doubts on stylistic grounds. It is true that among the miscellany of paintings and drawings being offered to an increasingly curious public were paintings that have since been identified as fakes. In 1925, the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris sold a head and shoulders, titled Young Woman, that was supposedly listed by the respected Ambrogio Ceroni in his catalogue raisonné; the attribution given was false. A few years later René Gimpel noted that the expert on Modigliani for the same auction house of Drouot, a M. Hessel, had bought a Modigliani from his own employer for fifty-five thousand francs. Hessel then showed the painting to Zborowski, who had to tell him that it was not “right.” In other words, a fake. Hessel was furious but in order to safeguard his own reputation there was nothing he could do. Three years after that, in 1932, Jeanne was thirteen and Margherita was in charge of authentications. She wrote to tell Giovanni Scheiwiller, Modigliani’s first biographer, “that the number of fake Modiglianis grows by the day; there must be a factory making them in Paris. The last note of sale made in Paris stated that I had certified a painting called ‘Étude in Tunis.’ The only catch was that poor Dedo was never in Tunis!”
The British artist John Myatt, one of whose specialties is painting fake Modiglianis (image credit 14.7)
So just how easy was it to fake a convincing Modigliani? John Myatt had a successful career in Britain as a forger of over two hundred works by Braque, Matisse, Chagall, Giacometti, and other modern masters before being unmasked ten years ago. After serving a prison term Myatt turned his versatile facility into the legitimate business of painting what he calls “genuine fakes.” Myatt said he had seen Modigliani’s work at a touring art show when he was at college in the 1960s. “I can remember standing there and thinking, ‘What a superb line.’ The speed and confidence of the line almost made me shiver.”
What makes the work seem easy to fake is the fact that Modigliani’s style simplifies facial features and does not articulate anatomical details, such as cheekbones, shoulders, and rib cages. It looks so simple that a child could do it. But on close inspection, the work reveals the brio of a master—Modigliani worked very fast—along with a dramatic energy that was uniquely his. One could reproduce this artist at the height of his powers exactly and still not have caught that animating spirit, that rapturous response that makes his work so compelling.
Given the size of the problem—Modigliani is one of the ten most faked artists in the world, along with Corot, Dalí, van Gogh, Utrillo, and Giorgio de Chirico—the actual paintings themselves have been subjected to remarkably little study. One of the most important was undertaken in Paris almost thirty years ago when the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris launched an exhibition of Modigliani’s work for its twentieth anniversary in 1981. Bernadette Contensou, then conservateur en chef, and Daniel Marchesseau, conservateur, decided they would subject a few doubtful works to a battery of technical tests to see what could be learned. To make sure there could be no question about the validity of the conclusions, the chief investigator would be Madeleine Hours, chief of the research laboratory at the Louvre. They studied several paintings but paid particular attention to three. One was a doubtful portrait in their own museum, La Femme aux yeux bleus in the Dr. Girardin collection, the second, a known fake in the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and the third, a puzzling portrait of Diego Rivera in a private collection.
The most interesting discovery followed an investigation of the underpainting, i.e., how the artist prepared his composition. They discovered that details of the face, nose, mouth, and eyes were uniformly drawn in “large and violent” rings of brown paint. These circular brushstrokes were so unvarying that this was a conclusive way to identify Modigliani’s hand. Genuine works always showed this artistic signature; faked works never did. Using this analysis along with other indications made it easy to identify the Diego Rivera portrait as atypical, but genuine, and the French and Scottish portraits as fakes. Most museums, presumably secure about the provenances of their works, or less curious, do not subject them to technical analyses. Gary Tinterow, curator of nineteenth-century and modern paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, told the author that the museum has never subjected its Modiglianis to technical analysis.
Paintings are not the only works by Modigliani that are faked. Drawings are very easy to forge and can be so convincing that it is almost impossible to tell whether or not they are “right” unless the provenance is absolutely ironclad, as in, for instance, the case of the Dr. Alexandre collection. Modigliani’s caryatids are another popular target but marginally easier to detect. In a landmark study, “Fakes and Forgeries,” by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1973, among the works on view were four caryatids in pencil, crayon, pen and ink, gouache, or watercolor. One was genuine. The three others, masquerading as by Modigliani, could be rejected on stylistic grounds. The genuine caryatid showed the “artist at his best, combining an essential and graceful curvilinear line with an overall feeling of solid, stable support which is the very basis of the caryatid figural type.” The forgeries, with their lumpen limbs and stylistically mangled heads, belonged to figures unable to sustain anything, much less a resemblance to the work of the man whose name they had appropriated.
The high point for fake Modiglianis—Restellini estimates there are at least one thousand on the market—took place during the thirty years after World War II, the 1950s through the 1980s, when everyone was in the game for easy money. Among them was an art historian named Alberto d’Atri, whose ostensible role as critic and writer about art was a front for his much more lucrative role of salesman and authenticater of Modigliani’s paintings. Or, as was said of another so-called authority, when asked to authenticate a work he would reply that if the owner would let him sell it, meaning for a handsome percentage of the profits, the painting would become whatever he wanted it to be. Conflicts of interest are nothing new in the art world, but some of the d’Atri howlers are so outrageous one cannot believe that anyone would offer them for sale with a straight face. They are now on deposit at the Archives of American Art in Washington, which is open to the public.
But even reputable auction houses like Parke-Bernet, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s were offering paintings for auction in which one would have to express serious doubts. A portrait of a woman sold by Parke-Bernet in the winter of 1958 came up again for sale at Christie’s in London in the summer of 1974. It was supposedly a portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne, with a Modigliani signature upper left and a certificate of authentication from Hanka Zborowska dated 1956. It was said to have come from the collection of “Mme. Hébuterne” in Paris and then to have belonged to a Mrs. Martin Baer of Paris, “the sister of the sitter.” This flagrant invention of a nonexistent sister should have sent up immediate warning flags for the specialists at Christie’s but, presumably, the sale went ahead.
Since this was the period in which certificates of authentication were appearing from all directions, one would expect Jeanne Modigliani to make some of the same mistakes. The evidence is that she did. As Marc Restellini wrote in the catalog of his exhibition “Modigliani: L’Ange Mélancolique,” at the Musée du Luxembourg in 2002–03, “the question of Modigliani’s authenticity has plagued Modigliani’s corpus, putting many people off, and constituting a major impediment to the appreciation of his oeuvre … In the 1950s, the often incongruous certificates of authenticity made out by Hanka Zborowska and Lunia Czechowska cast doubt over his entire corpus. For them, it was an answer to their dreams, an unexpected financial resource … Having written a very interesting work on the father that she scarcely knew … Jeanne Modigliani too permitted herself to certify the authenticity of certain works.”
The art historian and museum director Marc Restellini, author of a definitive catalogue raisonné on Modigliani (image credit 14.8)
What Jeanne Modigliani inherited was called the “droit morale,” or moral right, over her father’s work. Mark Spiegler wrote in Artnews, “The droit morale was intended to ensure that an artist’s heirs would have significant control over their ancestor’s legacy. In practice it often proves nettlesome; the children of an artist are not automatically experts in his work.”
For instance, Jeanne was legally allowed to make eight copies each of her father’s sculptures. Although all of them were in stone there was no requirement that the copies be in the same material. So Jeanne licensed them to be made in bronze. There is also a Tête de caryatid now at the Amedeo Modigliani Foundation in Rome that has been reproduced in wood. Many scholars, Restellini among them, believe the practice of reproducing an original work in any other material “runs directly counter to the creative philosophy” of the artist. Marc Blondeau, an art adviser and private dealer in Geneva, said, “Jeanne Modigliani was impossible because she signed authentication certificates in a very subjective way, without doing serious research.” She also certified works that have since been identified as fakes.
In Clifford Irving’s book Fake, about the masterful forger Elmyr de Hory, who painted over a thousand fakes of everyone from Picasso to Renoir and Matisse, there is a reference to the fact that he collaborated with Jeanne. Irving wrote that the forger “brought some Modigliani drawings to the representative of Mlle Modigliani, the painter’s daughter, secured an affidavit that they were genuine and then sold them to a prominent dealer on the Avenue Matignon.” De Hory worked with Fernand Legros, a Paris art dealer who also sold fakes manufactured by his friend Réal Lessard, an equally successful forger of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. Lessard subsequently published a tell-all book, L’Amour du faux, placing the blame for his nefarious career on his former friend, and publishing three of his Modigliani fakes. All were sold with certificates from Jeanne Modigliani because, he wrote, Legros wanted her imprimatur to silence the critics. Jeanne Modigliani “was a passionate admirer of the paintings of the father she had never known,” preparing “to admire indiscriminately anything that looked plausible.” Still, when he sent her a photograph of Lessard’s not-very-convincing Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne, Jeanne demurred. She wanted to see the actual work. Eventually she was allowed to inspect it with her lawyer, a Maître Hauert, and Legros in attendance. The negotiation was brief, Lessard wrote. Legros and Hauert immediately understood each other and the matter was settled to the mutual benefit of all concerned.
Nowadays certificates from Jeanne Modigliani have been thoroughly discredited. For the past several years prominent dealers and auction houses have refused to accept paintings without a cast-iron pedigree or an entry in the catalog published by Ambrogio Ceroni in 1958 and updated in 1970. Ceroni, who only listed works he actually saw, omitted at least eighty that did not compare well with paintings he believed to be authentic, a total of 337. His listing does not include many Modiglianis now in the U.S. that he never saw. The provenances also do not include the past history of the paintings but only their whereabouts at the time of publication. Still, Ceroni is considered the reigning authority. Spiegler wrote, “Unless a Modigliani has a perfect provenance, not being listed among Ceroni’s 337 paintings will slash its market value by half or even two-thirds.”
Christian Parisot is a convicted forger who has published numerous volumes on Modigliani’s paintings and drawings. He met Jeanne Modigliani in 1973 when he was working on a doctorate in art history, and they became friends. Parisot has curated numerous exhibitions and written catalogs and books about aspects of Modigliani’s life and work as well as a sourcebook, Modigliani, published in 2000. Now a professor at the University of Orléans, Parisot claims that the droit morale was passed to him by Jeanne Modigliani before her death in 1984. This repository of several thousand letters, diaries, documents, and photographs that had been assembled by Jeanne and her daughter Laure was now titled the “Archives Légales Amedeo Modigliani.” A prominent authority on Modigliani whom I interviewed said, “How these can be called ‘Legal Archives’ is an absolute mystery.” His understanding, along with that of many other historians, is that the legal right devolves upon the natural heirs and that Laure and Anne could have asserted this right but never have.
When questions were raised by the police in 2006 about the authenticity of some paintings and drawings with attributions from Parisot, it led to a police raid in search of the “Archives Légales.” According to the official website these could be consulted at the Musée de Montparnasse, 21 avenue du Maine. The director, Jean Digne, told the police this was not true. His museum had never housed the archives, he said. In any event the same archives are now housed at the via di Monte Giordano 36 in Rome. Now that the “Archives Légales” have moved to Italy, the French police “will have to work through European authorities if they wish to access them,” Artnews reported in September 2006.
Another case involving attributions by Parisot went to court in the spring of 2008. The problem began in 2002 and involved more than seventy drawings by Jeanne Hébuterne that Parisot had borrowed for an exhibition about Modigliani and his circle, held in Venice in October 2000. The drawings were lent by Luc Prunet but he became dissatisfied with aspects of the exhibition and uncorrected errors in the catalog. So when Parisot asked for permission to include the Hébuterne drawings in a new exhibition that would travel in Spain, it was refused. The drawings were returned and Prunet assumed the matter was closed.
Prunet was subsequently astounded to learn that a sizeable group of drawings and watercolors purporting to be by Jeanne Hébuterne were being exhibited in Spain. The modest value of work by an unknown French artist was not the issue. At issue for Prunet was the patent inferiority of what was being shown as his great-aunt’s work, along with the deception involved. The case took several years to move through the French courts. When it was eventually heard, in 2007, Parisot claimed he had bought the drawings at a flea market in Paris, but his explanations were not convincing and sentence was passed.
The sentence was appealed and the case reheard in November 2009. That second hearing took on the flavor of a Feydeau farce when, as Parisot prepared to leave the courtroom, he was arrested on a new charge of selling fake certificates for Modigliani drawings. A final verdict on the Hébuterne issue was handed down two months later, in January 2010. The original sentence had included several months in jail. This was suspended, but the appeals court greatly increased the cost of damages, to fifty thousand euros, and Prunet’s original award of one euro was also increased to fifty thousand euros. Although only tangentially related to Modigliani’s work, the Hébuterne case, involving as it did an expert on Modigliani, was bound to call into further question the still thriving trade in Modigliani fakes, of which the presiding judge who had given the original verdict was evidently well aware. Parisot, the judge said, had “used his well-known role as expert and archivist of Modigliani” to invent fraudulent provenances.
Osvaldo Patani, who has also published his opinions in several volumes, stopped work in 1999. He explained, “I am disappointed, demoralized and also annoyed. I am an honest man and nowadays I have to reckon with too many vested interests and too many fakes in circulation.” The same problems have dogged Marc Restellini, who originally planned two volumes of his catalogue raisonné, one of paintings and the other of drawings. When a prominent collector of Modigliani’s drawings learned that Restellini did not plan to include them in his new volume, he embarked on a campaign. One day Restellini received a phone call from his mother. “Marc, what have you done?” she asked reproachfully. “I haven’t done anything, maman,” he protested. It turned out she had just received a very large check in the mail. Meantime, he was receiving anonymous death threats. Lawyers were contacted, the check was returned, and the idea of a drawings catalog was dropped.
There is a coda to this subject. It seems that about ten years ago the art expert and museum director Daniel Marchesseau was contacted by a department dealing with forgeries in the Police Judiciaire. The police had seized a Modigliani painting, quite unlike his usual style, in which a man wearing a hat and a moustache sits at a café table with a carafe of wine and a glass. It is no. 275 in Ceroni’s list, painted in 1918 and listed as being in a private collection. Marchesseau had known about it for years but had never seen the original. In due course he was sent documentation by mail and invited to police headquarters to discuss his findings.
He told them, “This has to be a complete fake and a bad one at that.” He was interested because “problems appear when fakes are very well done and forgers are usually pretty talented. But this one was just bad, muddy and amateurish.”
After a minute or two, other officers, who had apparently been observing his testimony through a two-way mirror, suddenly appeared. They said, “What you are telling us is pretty interesting.” After about half an hour it transpired that they were part of a companion unit investigating currency fraud. The fake Modigliani was being offered for sale by a criminal gang. The prospective buyers were from another gang, they were paying with fake money, and the sellers were quite indignant about it. That reality, in the world of art, can triumph over illusion is the rarest of all.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s the lives of Victor Leduc and Jeanne Modigliani centered around their ardent belief in Communism. All the pain, the sacrifices, poverty, imprisonment, the secrets, subterfuges, and lies—it would all have been worthwhile because of the future that lay ahead, idyllic and serene. That faith would receive a shattering blow. It came in 1956, three years after the death of Stalin. Speaking at the Twentieth All-Union Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev, who had succeeded Stalin as premier, delivered a supposedly secret report that was immediately leaked, “The Personality Cult and its Consequences.” It was a denunciation of Stalin, his character, politics, rule, and role in the mass imprisonment and execution of thousands of political prisoners, the so-called gulags, that had been rumored and were now being acknowledged for the first time.
This was painful for Valdi, but even more agonizing for Jeanne. It was a betrayal of her dearest hopes, one more way that life had let her down. She abandoned politics to concentrate on her art. She had been painting for several years and won a scholarship to work on a study of Vincent van Gogh. She wrote, “The contrast between his own ideas and artistic aims … and the myth of the ill-fated painter whose genius was conditioned by his madness, led me to examine the crystallization of this type of legend.” In her refusal to be misled she wrote with so much restraint that, John Rewald commented, “her portraits of Modigliani and his friends actually lack warmth and life.”
Although Jeanne Modigliani’s biography makes frequent references to her father’s family there seems to have been little or no contact with her mother’s, a curious omission given that they all lived for many years in the same city. For explanation one need not look much further than the personality of her uncle André. Whatever anger was left for his sister’s actions quickly dissipated. Sometime early in 1920 he left Paris for a painting trip through the countryside. He wrote to his mother (“Ma chère Petite Me’ ”), “You know from experience how difficult it is to drive from one’s mind sad memories which overwhelm one sometimes.” As soon as he started painting he thought of Jeannette, and “it seems to me that she is just about to appear and I will soon be showing her what I have done and imagining what she is going to say.” In years to come André would keep a memento of hers close at hand.
After André Hébuterne died in 1992 at the great age of ninety-eight Georgette Hébuterne did try to explain, in an interview with Parisot, what she had not been able to discuss for decades, but perhaps it was all too long ago. She did, however, indicate one reason for her husband’s silence, and Anne Modigliani offered the same explanation. The family’s anger, no longer directed at Jeanne Hébuterne, had turned itself on her baby. That was in keeping with the popular view that if there was one thing worse than having an illegitimate child, it was being one.
At the time her book was published Jeanne Modigliani was professor of Italian at a lycée in Lille. She had her first exhibition as an artist at a gallery on the rue des Francs Bourgeois in the Marais, showing some splashy, Abstract Expressionist paintings. The name of Modigliani ensured a few sales. But her efforts were not a critical success. Jeanne had once worn her hair upswept off her forehead in a flirtatious little bun that lent an impish gaiety to her appearance. In later years she cut her hair within inches of her scalp and combed it forward. The result was monkish and not becoming at all. At the same time Jeanne, a moderate drinker to this point, became a compulsive one.
Dominique Desanti said, “She had an inner conviction that she was responsible for the gulags. She found out about them the same time we did, but for her it was unbearable to think she had supported this. After that, in order to paint and forget the fact that she was personally responsible for the gulags, she began to drink. She would say, ‘You know, we are all mass assassins, serial killers’ and, ‘Nobody has the right to live after that.’ ”
Jeanne Modigliani, not long before her death in 1984 (image credit 14.9)
Jeanne was repeatedly treated at programs for alcoholics that helped for a time, but she always started again. Valdi, who had given up so much to be with her, burdened by continuing financial responsibilities for his two families, in poor health, finally despaired of ever helping Jeanne and asked for a divorce. That came in September 1980. Valdi and Laure joined forces; Jeanne and Anne moved in together into an eleventh-floor studio apartment in a complex of high-rise buildings owned by the city of Paris on the Place d’Italie. It was comprised of a single large room with a kitchen and bathroom. It was then that Jeanne’s compulsion, lacking any remaining restraints, plunged her into the depths. One day Anne returned to the apartment unexpectedly to find her mother, completely drunk, completely naked, in the company of two or three men she had picked up off the street. Desanti said, “Everything in her life fell to pieces. Anne was ill. Laure had emotional problems. Certain people appreciated her paintings but they did not sell. She had the sense of guilt we all shared, and then Valdi left her.”
Jeanne’s history, Glodek concluded, was very hard. “It is the story of a woman difficult to describe, of a superior intelligence, but everything she wanted to do failed. Someone of enormous capacity and abilities, yet she suffered great hardships. One does not understand such a life.” Alcohol was her path to oblivion and she drank, Valdi said, “until she finally lost her mind.” One morning in July 1984, a young civil servant who had an appointment to see Jeanne about her state pension arrived at her door. There was no reply and so the concierge was summoned with a set of master keys. They discovered Jeanne Modigliani lying on the floor. She had been dead for three days.