SELECTION OF TEXTS
FRANCISCO CALVO SERRALLER
Modigliani: Bodies and Souls
“(…) From everything that has been said here it should be possible to appreciate how
Modigliani’s work not only connected the rich seam of artistic tradition (which, in his case,
went beyond the masters of Western classicism) with the most radical avant-garde, which
was undoubtedly the art of the first two decades of the twentieth century. In addition, he
forged a highly individual style from this combination. It is this complex conjunction of
historical and innovative elements, formulated outside any adherence to a particular
avant-garde movement, which has had the circumstantial result of leaving Modigliani in a
marginal position according to the canonical account of twentieth-century art history,
which is now being completely revised. In this sense, the label of member of the École de
Paris is no longer of any use. This is not just because the ambiguous nature of the École
functions as a sort of catch-all to hold all those artists who do not fit into a pre-established
scheme, but primarily because in the present day the history of avant-garde art is read in
terms of a vision that is less linear and more transverse. As a consequence, Modigliani can
no longer continue to be explained in terms of what he was not, but rather in terms of what
he was and what he did; Modigliani by Modigliani.
From this perspective it is possible to appreciate the emphasis that this exhibition
has placed on selectively locating Modigliani’s figure among those of his “masters” and
“friends.” Among the first group we have logically focused attention on his closest
precedents and his exact contemporaries, and have omitted possible models from the
more distant past. Among the second, his so-called “friends,” we have selected artists with
comparable careers who here function in the manner of some of the other “loose ends”
who are habitually inserted into the École de Paris category.
As I mentioned above, Modigliani’s modern masters were Cézanne, Gauguin, and
Toulouse-Lautrec, to whom we should also add, in a broader sense, Ingres and Degas, and
from a more expressionist viewpoint, Klimt. Within his own generation, his masters were,
above all, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi. The world of his colleagues was made up of
fellow artists such as Kisling, Soutine, Foujita, Pascin, Utrillo, Souza Cardoso, Van Dongen,
Rivera, Laurens, Zadkine, Lipchitz, and others. The latter, however, interact with Modigliani
like the echoes and resonances of Montparnasse, that symphonic poem in which each
instrument offers a different tone but one adjusted to fit within an interplay of harmonious
contrasts.
Thus, we see Modigliani immersed in the shadow garden of Montparnasse, but still
firmly upright as only a drunk knows how to be, whether drunk on alcohol or on art. I
imagine Modigliani standing up when he painted his figures: bodies and faces, bodies and
souls. He hardly painted any landscapes and those that he did produce are late works
executed in a relaxed manner but with echoes of Cézanne. Above all, Modigliani was
interested in the human landscape; a body can quite easily be a landscape if it stretches
into infinity. The famous lengthening of his figures is certainly a form of stylisation which
Modigliani derived not just from mannerism but from that rhythmical tradition in art that
extends all the way to Matisse.
Bodies and souls. It is precisely through a graceful and melancholy face that
Modigliani introduces that troubled modern reflection, that doubling effect, the
simultaneous vision of interior and exterior. The absent, self-absorbed face that looks within
is the counterpoint to the serene fount of the nude whose sensual, undulating rhythms of
the remote and perfect classical Venuses create an aesthetic cuirass: the torso as shield in
contrast to the tormented image of the face. In this way Modigliani offers us the
paradoxical lesson of affirming the immortality or timelessness of the body—that proof of
the classical paradigm—in contrast to the mortality of the soul—the modern paradigm and
a mere grimace of the face. His female nudes, including the most stylised ones, have the
firmness, elasticity, and freshness of nature which eternally renews itself, but their face
expresses nostalgia and awareness of the transience of all things. Modigliani’s painting
offers us the most complete iconology of the stolen souls of avant-garde and bohemian
Montparnasse in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Souls that are, in fact, Modigliani
himself. The artist died in 1920 at the precise moment of the triumph of the return to order,
an order that he himself had maintained throughout the time of the febrile, destructive,
and constructive experiments of the Cubists. Nonetheless, he bequeathed to us a modern
model of the figure, a synthesis between the romantic soul of the North and the sensual
Mediterranean body. To sum up: bodies and souls."
VICENTE MOLINA FOIX
Modigliani and the Price of Eternity
" Poor Modigliani. The phrase is used time and again in the bittersweet chronicles of
bohemian life in Montmartre around the years of World War I. “Poor Modigliani!” The
phrase is uttered by his friends, some of them painters, others poets, not to mention his
drinking companions on his nights out in Montmartre. It is also echoed by the girls who were
his models and casual lovers, and worst of all, for many years it is heard from the voice of
history. Likeable and unbearable by turns, tender, even, when his pride and anger allowed
it, Modigliani was loved and pitied more than he was appreciated as an artist.
During his short life Modigliani had devotees, protectors, and even a few admirers, and the
dissatisfaction and anxiety that he felt regarding his work almost until the end was
inevitably reflected in the disconcertment—often hidden behind kind words—of those who
merely saw him as a promising artist who needed to prove himself. So critically marginal, so
anomalous was he that even Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who had a sharp eye and a
ready willingness to detect new trends and give them names, did not accord Modigliani a
“style” of his own and only fitted him with difficulty into his book Ismos (1931) within “Lotheism” and “Rivera-ism” (even though André Lothe and Diego Rivera were undoubtedly
lesser painters than him). Gómez de la Serna also adopted a commiserative tone in his
brief summary of the artist: “[…] poor Modigliani, who threw himself off a balcony and his
lover behind him, both killing themselves on the funerary slabs of the pavement '.
The daughter that Amedeo Modigliani had with his lover, Jeanne Hébuterne, lost both her
parents at the age of 14 months and was brought up in Livorno by the artist’s family. Every
morning before going to school Jeanne Modigliani was made to polish her shoes with a
curious little pad made of pieces of sewn brown velvet, the remains, she was always told,
“of your poor father’s jacket.” Many years later Jeanne would write that in those early
years, “my father was for me the morning invocation to filial duty while, seated before a
large, black marble table, I forced myself, still half asleep, to drink my coffee with milk and
go over my schoolwork.” Her aunt and surrogate mother would often tell Jeanne stories,
evoking her father in a dramatic, pious light: “the tone, the gestures, the truncated phrases
suggested the idea of the genius, puerile, rather stupid, egotistical, and unbearable; while
we, serious, sensible people, aware of our responsibilities, could accept and admire them,
but could never understand them, of course.” At least at school, Jeanne wrote, mercifully
“no one or almost no one knew who ‘my poor father’ was.”
KENNETH WAYNE
Modigliani in the 1920s
"(...) Unlike Van Gogh, an artist with whom Modigliani is often compared and whose fame
arrived more than a decade after his passing, Modigliani’s renown increased inmediately.
But his demise was not the cause of his fame, which was already established and on the
rise.i Indeed, less than a month before the Italian’s death, Wyndham Lewis declared in a
London newspaper that Modigliani was the best-respected artist in Paris.ii The leading
critic, André Salmon, also referred to Modigliani as a major name in a text that was written
before the artist’s passing, but which was published immediately afterwards in 1920 in the
book L’art vivant.iii Salmon also noted then that he was preparing a study on the artist.
Clearly, Modigliani was on the verge of “breaking out” and becoming a dominant figure
when he died. This momentum carried well into the 1920s and kept him in the public eye:
Modigliani developed into the subject of numerous articles and one-man exhibitions and
posthumously came to symbolise the life and spirit of Montparnasse.
During the artist’s lifetime, his work was exhibited in Paris, London, New York, and
Zurich. In the decade following his death, it continued to be seen in these cities, but it also
reached further afield, making its way to Venice, Moscow, Dresden, Brussels, Antwerp,
Lyon, Tokyo, and Nagasaki. While having only one solo exhibition during his lifetime, he had
about a dozen in the 1920s.
(...) Interestingly, many of the patterns and trends in the Modigliani field that were
established in the 1920s have continued to this day. France and the United States were the
countries that devoted the most attention to the artist during the 1920s in terms of writing,
organising exhibitions, and making acquisitions, followed by England and Switzerland after
it.iv Italy and Germany were further behind. Despite the important role played by the latter
in the development of modern art, no monographic exhibitions were organised in
Germany in the 1920s and few articles on the artist seem to have been published there at
the time. Curiously, Spain, the land of Modigliani’s Sephardic forebears, was not involved
initially in his posthumous ascent to glory. It was not until 1983 that a one-man exhibition
devoted to Modigliani was organised in Barcelona and Madrid.
(...)The 1920s was a banner decade for Modigliani, during which he and his art
became firmly established in art history. The large number of one-man and group
exhibitions featuring his work, of books and articles on him, of museum acquisitions of his
art, as well as the frequency of auction sales of his work, demonstrate that this was a
pivotal period in Modigliani studies and history. It is impossible to disregard this decade
when trying to understand and assess the artist and his legacy.