ARTS
Romantic isolation
John McEwen
The fact that the Modigliani retrospective currently to be seen at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (till 28 June) is only the second major exhibition devoted to him by the French since he died in Montparnasse in 1920, is all too indicative of the critical brush-off he has received from academics everywhere over the past 60 years. This famous painter of the nude goes unmentioned in Clarke's The Nude. This artist of almost unparalleled popularity in terms of reproduction sales rates not a single reference in such recently published and intended popularisers as The Story of Modern Art or The Shock of the New. Is the critical demotion fair and, if it is not, how has it arisen?
The answer to the first question is, of course, `No'. The present retrospective errs on the side of academicism — too much space is given to early work, too little to the best and last; an untypical and early portrait publicises the show; there is, overall, too much defensive theory, not enough defenceless joy — nevertheless it confirms yet again beyond all doubt that the man was a genius, both in the sloppy and more precise usage of that word. He is a master, certainly and by any standard, in the art of portraiture and the nude; but he is also a sport, a freak, a talent of exceptional independence. Here again the academics have invariably served to obscure the issue by bending Modigliani's achievement to their own categorical ends. The public has principally favoured the sexy nudes, but the historians, while giving them the nod, have tended to busy themselves in other directions, like butlers caught at the keyhole. In 1919 the Parisian police banned an exhibi tion of these pictures because they depicted pubic hair. The historians have shown an equal sense of propriety on our behalf. They deny — or, perhaps more accurately, avoid — the sexual aspect by invariably discussing them in terms of the reclining Venuses of Giorgione and Titian.
It is true Modigliani trained in Venice for a while, but he was born in Tuscany and if his paintings of the nude have an origin it is surely to be found in the ancient art of Etruria itself. The elongations of Etruscan art, the love of the dance, even the terracotta colour, are his own. His nudes above all are a seductive dance of shapes, a play of visual rhythms. At his most explicit he will accentuate the contour of the figure with one, unbroken, lovingly caressive line. If Courbet paints women with the eye of a voyeur, Degas of an anatomist, Bonnard of a honeymooner, Renoir of a father, Picasso of a sultan, then Modigliani does it with the eye of a lover. Not since Goya has an artist succeeded in painting a picture of a naked woman that addresses itself more personally to the viewer. And 'personally' is the point, His models glow with individuality. They are portrayed with the utmost tenderness, both of affection and desire.
This tenderness, expressed by the refinement of his touch and colour, is equally the distinction of the late portraits. It comes as a revelation, because it is the one thing that does not show up on the postcards. Here again the professors have tended to downgrade Modigliani by associating his painting with his sculpture. Modigliani suffered from tuberculosis and one of the reasons why be abandoned sculpture was ill-health, but his much greater and very pure gift as a painter suggests that it was not the principal one, However, it is unquestionable that he gave up, and this has encouraged the canard that his painting is an enforced substitute arid, therefore, of its nature, inferior. Modigliara carved in soft stone that easily gets damaged, which may explain why there is only ofle. piece in Paris, nevertheless, in terms of his sculpture's relative importance to the pairit' ing, this does not seem disproportionate, He was sidetracked by carving, but bY restraining his painting it may have served a vital purpose. He gave up sculpture foar years before he died, and it is only for the paintings of this final period that he will be remembered. Most of these last portraits; of children even more hauntingly than 01 men and women, are little less of all achievement than the nudes. In them he demonstrates an extraordinary skill in re" ducing a face to its formal basics while retaining the suggestion of contradictory of fleeting emotion. They have no real ante'" dent in art. It is the derivative, pre-1916 Work that attaches him to Cezanne, Cubism, Pointillism and the rest.
His final work makes Modigliani impossible to categorise and therefore an art historical outcast. In achieving this romantic isolation he realised the fate his nature and upbringing had prepared him for. Dottiness, gambling, suicide ran in the family. His formidable mother served the Children a heady brew of Nietzsche, Bergson and Kropotkin. She taught them to deplore money and material wealth, question established values and be mercilessly self-critical in order continually to surpass themselves. Modigliani was her favourite, and it was in his artistic talent that she invested her own extravagant ambition. Accordingly, he saw art more passionately than most as a quest for immortality, his Jewishness and ill-health merely intensifying his own belief in himself as the personification of the outsider. His friend the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz recalls his constant assertion that his life would be brief but intense. It was. It had to be. He died aged 35. There is something mad and consciously godlike in this, but in his pictures, unlike those of Van Gogh, there is no Sign of turmoil, rather of sublime calm.
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