Up close with Modigliani and the sexiest nudes in modern art
PHILADELPHIA — What makes Amedeo Modigliani’s female nudes the sexiest in modern art?
I think it may be the most interesting question about him. Without the 30 or so pornographically repetitive but surpassingly sensual nudes he painted in 1916-1917, the sickly, doomed bohemian (soon to be the subject of the first Johnny Depp-directed film in 25 years) would likely be remembered as one of modernism’s minor mannerists: an interesting, precocious figure, alive to avant-garde preoccupations, but fatally formulaic and too cute by half.
Instead, Modigliani is incandescent — one of 20th-century art’s lodestars — and one of the most faked artists of all time. His biography fuels the legend. But really, the nudes are the pith of it. When they were first exhibited in Paris in December 1917 — in what turned out to be Modigliani’s only solo exhibition during his lifetime — one of them, visible from the street, so roused passersby that the police were called in and the work censored.
The stated offense? Displaying pubic hair. But I suspect the real issue was nothing so crass or specific. It was an emanation, a force field, a public blast of gratuitous erotic energy that was bound to embarrass. A postcard of another Modigliani nude, printed by the Guggenheim Museum, was similarly discontinued in 1955 after it was classified “unmailable” by the U.S. Postal Service.
Half a dozen of Modigliani’s nudes are on display at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (through Jan. 29). They’re joined by his signature long-necked, straight-nosed, blank-eyed portraits, piquant examples of his early work and a suite of his sculpted heads. The show, called “Modigliani Up Close,” was conceived to let scholars subject Modigliani’s materials and methods to technical analysis (presumably to help future experts distinguish authentic works from fakes). Revelations include insights into the Italian’s early preference for painting on used canvases and the identification of late canvases all cut from the same bolt of cloth.
What makes Modigliani’s late nudes so indelible (and at the same time vulnerable to imitation) is easily summarized. It’s their efficiency. Maximum heat, minimum fuss.
The heat is partly generated by Modigliani’s special way with flesh. Limned with dark hues, his models’ bodies are thrillingly aglow. Typically, he painted pale yellows tinged with pink over a gray-blue ground, setting warm skin tones against simplified backgrounds of burgundy, brown and black.
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But the heat is also a reality effect. It’s the friction generated by regular, pulse-like infusions of truth in the form of armpit and pubic hair, flushed cheeks, asymmetrical eyes and stray locks. All these give credible texture to the prevailing School of Paris drive toward idealized abstraction.
Modigliani applied his principle of contrast (reality vs. stylization; detail vs. distillation; rough vs. smooth) equally to the forms. His female bodies are weighted and tactile but also suavely elongated, powerfully compressed and cropped to create a sense of expansion beyond the frame.
Their orientation is usually diagonal, from top left to bottom right, suggesting weird amalgams of upright and recumbent positions and varieties of squirming engagement with the fact — the process — of being gazed upon. Sometimes they seem almost to float, to unfurl across the horizontal canvases like giant, jazzy hieroglyphs.
An exception is the Museum of Modern Art’s “Reclining Nude,” (c. 1919), in which the model is both resolutely horizontal and asleep. Only her hips tilt forward to face the viewer (improbably, because there is no visible twist in her torso). Almost every part of her anatomy is defined exclusively by outlines. The absence of modeling is near total. Yet here and there, subtle shifts in tone and color do suggest volume. A lolling breast, outlined with shadow, seems to roll off the flat canvas into the viewer’s space.
Do Modigliani’s nudes objectify female bodies? Without a doubt. There is no psychology in these paintings, nor does the painter use eye contact or gesture to endow his sitters with anything much in the way of agency. And yet, at least in my experience, women find these pictures as beautiful as men. Whether it’s because they harmonize adoring idealization with the shapes and textures of real women or because of Modigliani’s almost uncanny ability to evoke actual sensation, I can’t say. But I think it’s hard for anyone to look at these paintings without feeling conscious of the tingle of stimulated nerve endings, the clench and release of stretched muscles.
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Eros is life, and Modigliani’s determination to reproduce it on canvas was surely linked to his own atrocious morbidity. Born in Livorno, Italy, in 1884, he survived near-fatal bouts of pleurisy and typhoid in his early teens. At 16, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. His mother took him to Florence, and to the Uffizi, where, like Henri Matisse (another artist who came to painting via illness), he fell in love with artists of the early Renaissance. He returned to study art in Florence and then Venice.
When he was 21, Modigliani moved to Paris. He lived in Montmartre, where he quickly befriended the likes of Pablo Picasso, Chaim Soutine — a fellow Jewish expatriate — and Maurice Utrillo, the son of the artist Suzanne Valadon. He was also mentored by Constantin Brancusi; the Romanian sculptor’s influence is clearest in the Italian’s carved stone sculptures and drawings.
In Paris, Modigliani behaved like a young man who knew the clock was running down. Eager to make a name for himself, he was willing to work hard. He wanted to live richly. Women adored him. He was a natty dresser — the best in Paris, according to Picasso, whose girlfriend, Fernande Olivier, recalled that “you couldn’t take your eyes off [Modigliani’s] beautiful Roman head with its absolutely perfect features.” Among his lovers were artists’ models and women famous for their own creative achievements, including the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and the South African-born journalist Beatrice Hastings.
His biographer, Meryle Secrest, explains his drug and alcohol use as an attempt to alleviate or conceal the symptoms of his illness rather than a manifestation of unbridled Bohemianism. Either way, he had a problem.
It was probably the dealer Léopold Zborowski who suggested to Modigliani that he paint nudes. The Italian embarked on his famous series at the end of 1916. The Great War was raging, revolutionary fervor building, the grim reaper never busier. Inevitably, our knowledge of the period’s historical darkness — not only the carnage of the war but the ensuing influenza pandemic — enhances the paintings’ glow.
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In March 1917, Modigliani met Jeanne Hébuterne, a young artist’s model and aspiring artist. They fell in love. After she became pregnant, they moved to Nice where, shortly after the Armistice, she gave birth to a baby girl. Early the following year, first Modigliani and then Hébuterne returned to Paris.
Around this time, dozens of Modigliani’s paintings were included in a group exhibition in a London department store. Critical acclaim ensued. Suddenly, Modigliani’s career was taking off. But a magical cure failed to arrive. His health deteriorated. His drinking worsened. His teeth fell out. Tuberculosis, in the form of meningitis, overran his brain.
He died on Jan. 24, 1920. The next day, Hébuterne, who was eight months pregnant with their second child, took her own life by jumping from her parents’ apartment on the fifth floor.
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This is the truth, and also the myth, of Modigliani. It’s the story one tells because one cannot avoid it. But it overdetermines everything about the lives of its protagonists, not least the tragic couple’s surviving daughter, Jeanne, who grew up knowing little of her parents before compensating in adulthood by writing her father’s biography.
Modigliani was a good artist. He overcame extraordinary obstacles. He left behind portraits that were, for the most part, too stylized and repetitive to rise above the level of souvenirs, but also a series of nudes so powerful that rich people are willing to pay tens of millions of dollars to own them. The rest of us, seeking tokens of a life force that briefly stared down death, can find them in Philadelphia.
“Modigliani Up Close” at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, through Jan. 29. barnesfoundation.org
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