140 years have passed since the birth of the outstanding artist
Photo: wikimedia.org.
There is one pun that almost all of his biographers have paid attention to. Amedeo Modigliani’s nickname in Paris was Modi, with an emphasis on the last syllable. And this is exactly in tune with the French epithet maudit – “damned”, which suited him very well. A boy from a good Jewish family in his youth became an alcoholic and drug addict, lived penniless, could not sell his paintings, and died at the age of 35 from tuberculous meningitis. A very sad story, unless, of course, one counts the fact that after his death he became one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, and future generations saw pure romance in his poverty and misfortunes.
The very circumstances of his birth were a bad sign of fate. He was born at the very moment when the business of his father, the Livorno businessman Flaminio Modigliani, was going down the drain. Literally: Flaminio’s wife was giving birth to Amedeo, their fourth child, and the bailiffs were knocking on the door to confiscate the property. (However, everything worked out here: according to the old local law, it was impossible to describe the property of a woman giving birth, so all the most valuable items in the house were urgently dragged to her bed, and the bailiffs did not dare to touch them.)
Portrait of Pablo Picasso
Photo: wikimedia.org.
Things were saved, but the boy was not born with the best prospects in life, and it was not even a question of money. His family members suffered from tuberculosis, and Amedeo’s grandfather and aunt were also not very mentally healthy: they had persecutory manias and mood swings, which were passed on to the future artist (as an adult, he periodically suffered from bouts of demotivated rage). The awakening of the artist in Amedeo also occurred against the background of gloomy events: the boy, who was 14 years old, fell ill with typhus and was between life and death. According to legend, he had never mentioned painting before, but here, in a feverish delirium, he suddenly burst into a monologue about how he wanted to paint with passion and see for the first time the canvases hanging in the Florentine Pitti Palace and the Uffizi. His mother, after listening to him, promised to find him a teacher and take him to Florence – as if from that moment the patient’s condition began to improve rapidly.
Not only did he have a teacher, but he also began to travel around Italy, not missing a single museum. And when he was 21, he decided that he had seen enough in his homeland, and with the money his mother gave him he set off to conquer Paris. Of course, the young man wanted to look like a representative of bohemian life and hung out with poor artists, but he himself rented a decent apartment and dressed quite elegantly. Brown velvet trousers, a scarlet scarf, a big black hat… They say that he once said about Picasso: “Even if he is a genius, that does not give him the right to dress carelessly.”
According to another, even more popular legend, Modigliani once gave a five-franc note to Picasso, who was practically begging for alms. What a moment of charity. But over time, everything turned upside down, and a few years later Picasso, in a fit of generosity, gave Modigliani, who was really poor at the time, a hundred-franc note with the words “I pay the debt!” Modigliani, to turn everything into a joke, said: “Don’t expect any changes, I remember that I’m a Jew.” But he was in desperate need of money. The mask of the bohemian party-goer living off his mother’s money has disappeared. He really became addicted to absinthe and hashish. There is a version that with their help he wanted to distract himself from tuberculosis, which was slowly eating him up from the inside and from which, in general, there was no salvation (several decades were left before the invention of antibiotics).
The paintings did not generate income: no one simply bought them. People simply did not know how to relate to Modigliani’s portraits, in which the heads and bodies of people were strikingly elongated, or to which artistic movement to attribute them. And they were believed to have little artistic value. In 1911, Amedeo said: “In my imagination I paint at least three paintings a day, but why waste canvases? After all, no one will buy them anyway.” He was easily willing to destroy the finished works: once he took a cart full of his own stone sculptures and threw it all into a canal (in the 1980s, this canal was searched for by divers). And once he was haggling with a buyer over his drawings, the buyer kept lowering the price, and when it became completely ridiculous, Modigliani turned pale with anger and shame, pierced the entire pile of drawings with a knife, strung them with string and defiantly hung them in the toilet, instead of toilet paper.
woman with fan
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She led an extremely stormy personal life. One of her brightest and most lyrical episodes was an affair with the Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova (shortly before that she married Nikolai Gumilyov, but this did not interfere with her relationship with Modigliani, platonic or not). Modigliani took her to the Luxembourg Gardens, where at that time you had to pay a few cents for chairs, but Modigliani did not have any and he and Akhmatova sat on free benches. Then one day she came to his studio with red roses, did not find him and threw all the roses one by one out of the window (Modigliani really liked the way they were on the floor). “He had the head of Antinous and eyes with golden sparks. He was completely different from any other person in the world. His voice somehow remained forever in my memory. I knew him as a beggar and it was not clear how he lived. As an artist, he did not have the slightest shadow of recognition… And everything divine in Modigliani seemed to shine through a kind of darkness.” Surprisingly, Akhmatova added that she never saw Modigliani drunk and that he never smelled of wine.
What remains of their romance are Akhmatova’s memories, several drawings (most of them are missing, but here and there, for example, in the Rouen Museum, something can be found) and a poem:
I have fun with you when I’m drunk.
Your stories don’t make sense.
Early autumn hanging
Yellow flags on the elms.
With other women, he was less romantic. For example, Modigliani once threw the English poet and writer Beatrice Hastings out of a window, and during a particularly violent fight, she tried to bite off his genitals. Well, at least that was the kind of gossip that circulated in Montparnasse. It was an unusually stormy novel, with cries of “Help, they are killing!”, which captured the imagination of witnesses such as Ilya Ehrenburg. According to him, once, when another scandal was brewing, Beatrice was able to calm Modigliani with the words: “Don’t forget that you are an aristocrat and your mother is a society lady.” Modigliani seemed to have calmed down, but then he went to the wall and began methodically tearing off bricks with his bare fingers, breaking his nails and leaving a bloody mark on the plaster. Ehrenburg felt so uncomfortable that he bowed and left.
When the painful affair with Beatrice ended, Jeanne Hebuterne entered Modigliani’s life. This novel was not scandalous, but very sad. Zhanna was 14 years younger than the artist and fell in love with him like a cat. She gave birth to his daughter, then they almost got married, but Jeanne’s parents were sharply against it: firstly, their daughter’s chosen one was Jewish (and they themselves are zealous Catholics), secondly, and most importantly, he had a reputation as a drug addict and a drunk. It is not very clear how this relationship would have developed if tuberculosis had not had a say: the disease sharply worsened, brain swelling began, and at the age of 35, Amedeo Modigliani, the unrecognized genius of French painting, died. And Zhanna, who was eight months pregnant, in a fit of despair committed suicide with herself and her unborn child. The lovers will eventually be buried in the same tomb at Père Lachaise; Next to Modigliani’s name will be written “Death overtook him on the eve of glory”, next to Jeanne’s name – “Amedeo Modigliani’s faithful companion, who sacrificed her life for him”.
Naked on the couch
Photo: wikimedia.org.
Glory did not really have to wait long. Connoisseurs finally began to appreciate the beauty of Modigliani’s endless portraits of women – a few decades later the artist completely “went among the people” (suffice it to say that on the wall of Lyudmila Prokofievna’s house hangs a portrait of him from his work “Office Romance”). Now he is one of the most expensive artists and sculptors in the world – his “Nude on a Sofa” was sold at auction in 2015 for $ 170 million. Naturally, on all his paintings there is the legend about the damned artist, who became lascivious and scandalous in order to shine more. She is really sad. And it is really very beautiful.
