Via Leghorn
Modigliani: Man and Myth. By Jeanne Modi- gliani. (Andre Deutsch, 55s.) Tills magnificently illustrated book has as its text hill essay by the daughter of Modigliani and Jeanne Hebuterne. Jeanne Modigliani is an art historian, and her intention is not, as she herself tats, 'a sentimental attempt to recreate the image of the father I never knew'; instead she cor- rects the journalist's picture of a painter only achieving his best work under the stimulus of drugs, alcohol, Paris and Jeanne Hebuterne, and the critic's picture of a painter suddenly achiev- ing greatness in 1917 and 1918 two years before his death. Her success would seem to be complete, especially as she relies not on anecdote or inter- pretation, but on fully documented chronology.
In this Jeanne Modigliani has had one great advantage in being able to consult her grand- mother's diary and a history of the Modigliani I amily which she wrote for her children's amuse- ment. It is largely from this source that a picture emerges quite different from that of art journalists such as Andre Salmon, who show us a poor sickly boy turning to painting and sculpture after an attack of typhoid and only doing his best work in the full fury of his Parisian dissipa- tions, requiring stimulants as diverse as tuber- eulosis and cocaine to recapture in imagination the Mediterranean colours that could not be found under the alien northern sky, etc. etc. We discover instead a bourgeois Jewish-Italian family fallen on bad times but still living comfortably In . Leghorn. At the turn of the century Modi- tliani's brothers and uncles and aunts, partly because they were intelligent and interested in new ideas, partly perhaps because they were Poorer than they had been (always as good a
reason for new departures as any), became socialists, anarchists or populists. His mother adored him, encduraged his becoming an artist and sent him regularly what money she could afford. While he drugged and drank—and no attempt is made to disguise the recalcitrance and tiresomeness of his last few years—he still sent notes and photographs to his family.
His daughter's most interesting remarks con- cern the dating of some famous paintings. It has often been supposed that during a short period soon after the end of the war the arche- typal Modigliani pictures were painted; that after ten years in Paris he achieved, at the height of his physical disintegration, a classical repose and balance in his canvases; and that, by implication, all that had gone before was less valuable than the work of these years; so that afterwards, until his death in 1920, his standard deteriorated—with Jeanne Hebuterne's neck curving aimlessly this way and that before it meets the chin: We are shown something like a critical conspiracy to force all those cylindrically necked children and splendidly rich odalisques into one small period and to father them on School of Paris parents. It is now made clear that Modigliani did not give up sculpture at a particular date—it remained his obsession; that his best pictures were painted any time between 1914 and his death; that his exhi- bitionism was part of his character between spells of work, but never part of the work itself. Of the three Jewish painters of the School of Paris—Chagall, Soutine and Modigliani—the latter had the widest visual curiosity, and drew on examples as far apart in time and sympathy as Siennese sculpture, Negro masks and the early cubist discoveries. His volumes, his colour, his solidity are nevertheless splendidly his own. This .book is worthy of the great artist he was, and worthily destroys the wild man of the raconteurs,
SIMON HODGSON
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