UNMISTAKEABLE LONG NECKS
An anecdote to start off with:-
It wasn’t the voluptuous curves of the naked woman, stretched out across the window of a small Paris gallery in 1917, which horrified the police commissioner who unfortunately lived directly opposite. It was the shocking fact that the artist had given her hair – and not just on her head, but pubic and underarm hair as well.
That exhibition was the only solo show in the lifetime of an artist whose life was short, poor, and scarred by illness and alcohol and probably drugs
I had read before coming that the exhibition would bring together ten of the nudes. No photographs either so I resorted to a small catalogue. I did not photo all the nudes….
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| Reclining nude - 1919 |
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| Caryatid - 1913-14 |
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| Female Nude - 1916 |
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| Reclining Nude, Head Resting on Right Arm - 1919 |
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| The Sleeping Venus by Giorgione - 1510 |
Police closed down the 1917 exhibition in Paris for gross indecency, and it only reopened after the offending nude had been taken out of the window. The model for several of the paintings was his mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, who had already shocked her family by training as an artist, and then aged 19 moved in with Modigliani, regarded by many as a degenerate philanderer addicted to hashish and opium. They planned to marry, but she was pregnant with their second child when he died penniless of tubercular meningitis. She killed herself two days later.`
Despite his poverty and lack of commercial success, dozens of artists attended his funeral in Paris. He knew many or probably most of the artists of that period. He painted Picasso – shown as a bit of a bruiser, with a shock of dark hair – the painter Juan Gris, and a playful portrait of his friend Jean Cocteau. Surprisingly for me, there was a portrait of the painter Diego Rivera, best known for his monumental murals in Mexico and his turbulent relationship with the artist Frida Kahlo, but who once shared a Paris studio with Modigliani.
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| Picasso - 1915 |
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| Juan Gris - 1915 |
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| Max Jacob -1916 |
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| Paul Guillaume - 1916 |
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| Jean Cocteau -1916 |
But who was this man? Handsome, that is for sure. Born in 1884 in Italy he knew that if he was to develop his career as an artist, there was only one place to go - Paris. He moved here when he was 21.Modigliani belonged to an educated family of Sephardic Jews who encouraged his ambition to become an artist. He was encouraged to read and learn languages. But it was Paris that offered him excitement and a variety of distractions which were a challenge and developed his work.
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| Self Portrait - |
Back to the beginning of the exhibition. We came into this painting.
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| Self Portrait - 1915 |
This is a self portrait painted around 1915 in which Modigliani presents himself as a the tragic clown Pierrot. The artists of that period could identify with Pierrot - linked to the past and yet open to the future. We could perhaps say that as Paris was a new place for him, Modigliani was ready to "invent" himself.
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| Red Bust -1913 |
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| Porttrait of Beatrice Hastings 1913-14 |
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| Caryatid - 1913 |
There were several years at the beginning of his life in Paris when he mostly worked on sculpture in various materials. Chalk, clay... and others which seemed to be sculptures, turned out to be paintings.
Some paintings were not recognizably Modigliani. These for example
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| The Cellist - 1909 |
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| Head of a Woman in profile - 1906-07 |
But of course those long necks could only be Modigliani
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| Black Hair -1918 |
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| Woman with velvet ribbon -1915 |
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| Beatrice Hastings - 1915 |
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| Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne - his wife - 1918 |
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| Simone Martini & Lippo Memmi - we can see what influenced Modigliani is this painting - Virgin and vase of flowers - 1333 |
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| Marguerite -1916 |
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| Madame Pompadour -1915 |
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| Jeanne Hébuterne - his wife - 1918 |
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| Jeanne Hébuterne - his wife - 1919 |
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