Hard on the heels of the National Gallery’s show Rebels and Martyrs, about the changing perception of the artist, comes this exhibition of Modigliani’s paintings. The title makes a shameless and immediate reference to the myth of the decadent bohemian surrounded by lovers. This may serve to attract the punters, but it doesn’t help us take the art more seriously.
Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) was a middle-class Italian Sephardic Jew, born in Livorno, who left home for the bright artistic lights of Paris in 1906, and tragically never found success there. As an artist he has been ill served by the legend that grew up around him, the misplaced glamour of self-destructiveness and early death. He was hard-working but subject to abrupt mood changes, a man of great charisma and personal beauty who strove to make art which would matter. Influenced towards extreme formal simplification by a study of archaic sculpture and the example of Brancusi, Modigliani carved extensively in limestone before returning to paint in 1914.
Modigliani suffered poverty, addiction to drink and drugs, illness and despair. His life was chaos, but his work suggests harmony, despite its fatal leaning towards the tasteful. Unfortunately, his abbreviations or attenuations of form quickly became mannerisms. Famous for his swan necks, he didn’t bother much with hands or feet either, aiming instead for a general impression of elongated (and essentially boneless) elegance. In the striking but ridiculously schematised portrait of Juan Gris in this show, he presents the head and neck as if carved, unsubtly plonked down on a pair of cardboard cut-out shoulders.
As to the legend, Douglas Goldring, who actually knew the artist, has this to say: ‘The neuroses of a Modigliani, which led to exhibitions of intoxication in crowded cafés, were taken at their surface value and romanticised for purposes of fiction. Few realised that, apart from these ebullitions, Modigliani was just a diffident, rather shy, sensitive and well-educated “bourgeois” Jew. It became the fashion to represent painters as over-sexed alcoholics, brilliant, immoral and full of a dangerous fascination. To anyone whose circumstances had brought him into close contact with painters throughout a lifetime, these fancy pictures were ludicrous in the extreme.’ Modigliani’s friend Epstein said the legend was just a legend, nothing more, and we should look to the art. A pity, then, that the art is so unrewarding of close scrutiny.
The more time you spend in this exhibition, the stronger the first impression of lack of range and variety becomes. The portraits are distressingly similar and formulaic, the nudes even more so. Yet the exhibition opens with a couple of less stereotypical images: expressive paintings of Picasso and the noted collector of African sculpture, Frank Burty Haviland. There’s also a token sculpture in this room, a tall, narrow limestone head with a long blade of a nose. Nearby are immensely simplified paintings of a caryatid and a large red bust, not without a primitive charm and effectiveness. As you move into the main room of the display, you are greeted by a reclining nude from 1917, from the Guggenheim Museum, and the admirable seated nude familiar from the Courtauld. (It’s a breath of fresh air among so many reclining beauties with full breasts and canted hips. The atmosphere of erotic languor is almost stifling.) A bit further down is ‘Reclining Nude with Outstretched Arms’ (1917), a most bizarre and unreal image, like a pneumatic rubber doll, or a mannequin illustrating the position of the body in a murder investigation.
Also in this main room is a series of portraits, most of them either flushed or very pale (mirroring Modigliani’s favourite colour combination of terracotta and slate grey). Many have dry scratchy surfaces, bordering frequently on the unfinished. This speedy attack has its own appeal (look, for instance, at ‘Paul Guillaume’ of 1915), though Modigliani’s paint is more satisfying when it is fatter and more worked, as it is in the nudes. When he knew a sitter well, as in the case of his mistress Beatrice Hastings, he was occasionally prepared to risk an uncompromising portrayal. The three-quarters profile of her in a checked shirt is tough and unflattering, and even approaches a psychological assessment rare in his work, very different from the conventional type of schematised oriental visage he gave her in the two neighbouring portraits.
The end room is devoted to portraits, and it is at this point that the exhibition really begins to pall. The blank monochrome eye-holes and pursed lips of these peasants and children offer very little to the inquiring gaze. There’s not enough substance here to sustain the intelligent visitor’s interest beyond a superficial level. Cruelly underrated during his lifetime, Modigliani is now in danger of being ludicrously overrated. Half-a-dozen of these pictures might be bearable, but rooms full of them? The ultimate gallery concentrates on portraits of Modigliani’s last mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, who committed suicide after Modigliani’s horrifyingly sordid death from tubercular meningitis. (She herself is the subject of an extraordinary and perverse book by Patrice Chaplin, called Into the Darkness Laughing.) You get no idea of what she was like or even what she looked like, so dedicated to his mannerisms had Modigliani become. One portrait only, a smallish head from 1917–8, has some expression in the eyes, and you feel the artist for once might have looked at his subject. This room also contains a self-portrait, probably the artist’s last work, dying but still a dandy, with blind, unseeing eyes.
This show will probably be a crowd-puller, another popular success for an institution which has come to specialise in them. Modigliani’s work is not demanding, it’s easy on the eye, and the visitor gets the point of it very quickly. All this is reassuring. His art appeals particularly to adolescent taste and unformed judgment, a quality which extends to his myth, and the fact that he has been supposedly ‘misunderstood’. On the contrary, he has been understood only too well, and as a consequence dismissed as the minor (but undoubtedly attractive) artist he actually was. The Academy devotes the Sackler galleries to one aspect of his output only — the figure paintings. These nudes and portraits do not bear such extensive showing. Twelve years ago the RA gave us a gigantic exhibition of Modigliani’s drawings. (Nearly 400 items from the collection of Paul Alexandre.) Now it is giving us the paintings. Perhaps a display of the sculptures is pencilled in for a dozen years hence. This is overkill. Modigliani’s talent is too slender to sustain such exposure, except as a cynical exercise in box office. A better-conceived exhibition would have been an all-inclusive survey of his career, featuring a few of the best paintings, sculptures and drawings. But such balanced assessment seems to be currently beyond the ken of curators and organisers driven by the spectre of revenue.
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