Modigliani: Plane Geometry Personalized

New York Times:

May 21, 2004
ART REVIEW;
Modigliani: Plane Geometry Personalized By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

IT is astonishing that the catchy show opening today at the Jewish Museum is the first big New York retrospective of Amedeo Modigliani since 1951, considering his huge popularity. Toting the show's catalog around town the last several days, I have actually been accosted by people on buses and subways, inquiring whether there is a Modigliani show. Believe me, this does not happen with a Jacques Lipchitz catalog under my arm.

An Italian woman asked briefly to borrow the book on the crowded uptown No. 1 rush hour train to show to her toddler. An elderly woman on the No. 3 bus requested I leaf through the illustrations more slowly while she peered over my shoulder. A middle-aged couple, evidently already aware of the retrospective, stopped me on Madison Avenue, having noticed the book in my hand, to ask if the exhibition had opened yet. Looking rather weary the other day, Mason Klein, the show's curator, reminded me that an indie biopic about Modigliani is also in the works, starring Andy Garcia.

So why Modigliani? Partly it is the life: he is the prototypical handsome, promiscuous, inebriated, pugnacious, misunderstood, tragically ill, impoverished, vulnerable, gifted and short-lived exemplar of la vie de bohème.
The cliché is that he was never without his box of hashish pills or a glass of absinthe. When he wasn't nursing a café-crème and a hangover at La Rotonde, he was trading portrait sketches for a few centimes; or dancing naked with a woman at the Place Jean-Baptiste Clément at 3 in the morning; or passing out at the Bateau-Lavoir; or picking fights; or swiping limestone from abandoned buildings for his sculptures because he was too poor to buy his materials.

The familiar comparison is to one of those gloomy characters from the pre-Cubist paintings by Picasso, whom, naturally, Modigliani deeply envied, admired and resented. Picasso was another magnetic, wildly ambitious, transplanted Mediterranean romantic in the city that the writer Blaise Cendrars, Modigliani's friend, aptly called the ''central railway station platform of destinies'' and ''cross-roads of anxieties.'' You might say that Modigliani's own anxieties had to do with the fact that in life he never quite got past the Blue Period.

Mr. Klein's weariness, I suspect, derives from struggling to shift the conversation about Modigliani away from this tawdry and irresistible litany of the artist's debauched biography -- what he calls the Modigliani myth -- toward other issues that speak more germanely to the work.

Modigliani's popularity depends on this work, ultimately: on his languid, pretty, easily digested and unmistakable brand of delicately abstracted modernism. As with Chagall or Ben Shahn, it could frequently tip over into kitsch or parody. But at its best, it was original and exquisite.

Modigliani is occasionally rescued like this. A select group of great sculptures and paintings belies the stereotype of him as an impulsive lunatic doing poster-ready art, hellbent on self-destruction, and indicates someone of worldly intelligence, patience, discipline and steady concentration.

He was, as Mr. Klein says, an unaffiliated artist; his work steered clear of Cubism and the Futurism of his fellow modernist Italians. And this separateness, Mr. Klein contends, dovetailed with an awareness of being twice an outsider in France, as an Italian and a Jew. ''I am Modigliani, Jew,'' was how he occasionally introduced himself, after encountering anti-Semitism for the first time in post-Dreyfus Paris.

He was born in 1884 in Livorno, into a household of faded luxury. He came from an enlightened family of Sephardic Jews, descended from Spinoza. Modigliani's father squandered the family fortune and left. His mother, Eugenia, an independent woman, went to work, which was nearly unheard of for a woman in Italian bourgeois families. She translated D'Annunzio for an American writer, opened an experimental school and instructed her children to read Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. Modigliani's brother, Emanuele, was an anarchist and socialist, imprisoned in 1898. The family stood by him.

The atmosphere at home was liberal, religiously unobservant, pluralistic and somber. Modigliani was a sickly boy who convalesced by reading Dante and Ariosto. He was an indifferent student until he went to art school. Then he hankered for Paris, where he arrived in 1906 with a small stipend that he quickly spent.

Spinoza, D'Annunzio, socialism: Modigliani's favorite book was the Comte de Lautréamont's ''Chants de Maldoror,'' a decadent classic. He talked about his admiration for Whistler, Wilde and Cézanne. His first works in Paris were brooding, slightly outmoded portrayals of ravaged characters in lurid colors, the style an anguished, neurasthenic Symbolism owing to Lautrec and Picasso. Like other artists, he became inspired by ''primitive'' art: African, Egyptian, archaic, early Christian, Oceanic and Khmer sculpture. He always considered himself a sculptor first. Brancusi, whom he sought out, became the central figure in his development.

What emerged by 1911 were finely chiseled heads, hieratic and sublimely poised, with the impassive aura of totems. There is a handsome suite of them in the show. Various ancient idioms were distilled into a linear geometry of tapered features and plain shapes: ovals, half moons and circles, the nose and eyebrows typically forming a swooping Y. Almost fetishistically simple, the sculptures have an air of spirituality that suggests not the usual formal plundering by a Western artist of non-Western material but a sensitivity to the original votive and symbolic functions of his sources.

''To sleep amidst your idols from Oceania and Guinea,'' wrote Apollinaire, ''these are Christs of another form.'' He might have been speaking for Modigliani.

So Modigliani's first mature style emerged, consisting of attenuated, sloe-eyed, long-lined arabesques to describe a face, which functioned like a mask. Modigliani also drew caryatids, imaginary architectural columns of figures: voluptuous women, abstracted into circles, straining and twisting, like Michelangelo's slaves or like sculptured Indian goddesses. Again, a hint of spirituality.

The exhibition has a few odd religious drawings, a St. John the Baptist, an Adam, a St. Jerome. Some of the struggling caryatids can be interpreted as metaphors for the Jews' inability to escape their identity, Mr. Klein ventures. He sees stigmata on a seated nude. Maybe. Modigliani was clearly wrestling with something besides the formal felicity of elongated shapes.

He chose for himself the role of pariah. The artist Maurice Vlaminck once recalled that among artists ''the done thing was to be or at least look abnormal or strange.'' Modigliani, by conforming, declined to blend in. The show's thesis is that this had partly to do with his search for a visual language expressing the conflict between assimilation and difference: Modigliani's antique and non-European allusions conveyed a hint of cultural dislocation. The mask, a common device by various artists then, became in his case a social metaphor. We all wear masks. They assign us identities and obscure our true nature. We become a combination of our public and private faces.

Emily Braun, a scholar writing in the exhibition's catalog, points out that after Modigliani turned, because of poverty and bad health, from sculpture to painted portraits, he chose fellow Parisian outsiders, artists and others around him, identifiable but sharing similar, enigmatic features. ''His ethnically diverse subjects lose their individual personalities in a collective portrait of the socially marginal,'' she says. ''Not merely stylized heads, Modigliani's faces represent the hybridization of the European tribe.''

Modigliani in his portraits devised a common denominator of forms that sufficed as caricature and symbol. The style owed something, consciously or otherwise, to the different streamlined legacies of Botticelli, Parmigianino and Aubrey Beardsley. It concealed as much as it revealed: Modigliani's faces retain their calm impenetrability, which frustrates a desire to read them easily, to pigeonhole people simply by their appearance.

The results are magical in some portraits, like the one of a man against an orange backdrop, the colors rich and suave, the skin as delicate as rose petals; or of Jeanne Hébuterne, Modigliani's last lover, one finger pressed into her cheek, her head tilted and turned, a red-headed swan. These are mannerist tours-de-force, refined, their lines tracing rhythmic patterns, the paint put down with solidity and finesse, the faces tinged by melancholy. With the portrait of Cocteau, the pinched features and sharp angles suffice to carry the message of insufferable elegance.

There are facile portraits, too, crudely brushed, which have a cheap, ingratiating charm. The show, an overstuffed affair that has mostly wonderful things, includes a few of these duds. It ends with the infamous nudes, which are uneven.

I imagine Balthus grasped the incendiary, paradoxical combination of erotic aggression and coy innocence that provoked a predictable scandal when these works were first exhibited. The women gaze back at the people who gaze at their pubic hair.

Today the fuss over them seems quaint, as do most of the nudes, which nonetheless rise occasionally to the level of the memorable portraits and sculptures: their fleshy surfaces built up, their humanity apparent, their expressions cool but simmering. They fulfill Modigliani's enduring project of combining sculptural mass with dancing lines, presenting people who are both generalized and specific.

Who knows where Modigliani would have gone had he lived longer? He died of tubercular meningitis in 1920, at 35. The next day Jeanne Hébuterne, the mother of their young daughter, who was about to give birth to another child, threw herself out the window. When his studio was cleared, drawings by Jeanne were found in which she showed herself piercing her breast with a dagger.

It turns out that Modigliani did not fit the bohemian myth to the end, by dying unloved and unappreciated. There was an enormous funeral procession for him to Père-Lachaise. Policemen who had arrested him over and over took off their hats as his flower-draped coffin passed. A rabbi said prayers over the grave. Many artists paid their respects: Picasso, Brancusi, Chaim Soutine, Fernand Léger, Gino Severini, Maurice Utrillo, André Derain and Jacques Lipchitz.

''Modigliani: Beyond the Myth'' remains on view at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3200, through Sept. 19.