Amadeo Modigliani

>SCULPTURAL S O U RC ES After studying at several art schools in Florence and Venice, in 1906 Amedeo Modigliani left his native Italy for Paris. In Montmartre, he made the acquaintance of Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, and Diego Rivera. In late 1907, he was introduced to Dr. Paul Alexandre, who became his patron, replaced by Paul Guillaume during the war. Following a

stimulating encounter with Constantin Brancusi in 1908, for several years Modigliani devoted himself more or less exclusively to sculpture. He rented a studio in Montparnasse and socialized with Jacob Epstein, Jacques Lipchitz, and Ossip Zadkine. This was the beginning of a key period in his work, during which he drew inspiration from numerous sources, forging the most significant

elements of his style. As the Cubist movement emerged, Modigliani sought to create a “synthetic” image of the human figure. Using the direct carving technique, he executed some thirty sculptures in stone, and produced several hundred drawings in which he stretched or flattened the face, elongated or enlarged the eyes, accentuated the bridge of the nose, and reworked the line of the

eyebrows. Frequent visits to the Louvre and Trocadéro museums provided further inspiration: the ancient Egyptian reliefs, Greek statuettes, masks from the Ivory Coast, and fragments from the Angkor temples all fascinated the artist.

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ART THAT SEPARATES AND UNITES: MODIGLIANI’S MAGNUM OPUS 1909–1915 JEANNEBATHILDE LACOURT

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fig. 7

Pablo Picasso Head of a Man, December 1912 Graphite and pieces of newspaper glued onto paper, 68 x 47 cm LaM, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, former collection of Roger Dutilleul

The knower, the creator, and the lover are one.

SCULPTURAL SOURCES

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At the end of his life, Pablo Picasso described the drawings he was making between 1912 and 1914, with sculptural possibilities in mind, as “synthetic”.1 In a series of Heads executed between the summer and fall of 1912, the opacity of Analytic Cubism was gradually giving way to a sharper line, clearer forms, and a more intelligible image. African tribal art, probably seen in August in Marseille, was also making a discreet return in this work, after its spectacular appearance in 1908.2 According to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, theoretician of Cubism and a great reader of Kant, the operation began in the summer of 1910. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were reconstructing the figure or object, after breaking them down into multiple facets. By adding nails, block letters, or pieces of paper to their compositions, they were seeking to “put together the various conceptions and comprehend their variety in one perception.”3 The process was akin to handicraft, the approach reflexive, and the image conceptual.

Between 1910 and 1914, Amedeo Modigliani was thinking only of sculpture. The numerous

1 Pierre Daix, “Synthétique – II,” in Dictionnaire Picasso (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1995), pp. 859–60.

2 Philippe Dagen, Le peintre, le poète, le sauvage.

Les voies du primitivisme dans l’art français, (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), pp. 492–96.

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3 Unreferenced quotation from Immanuel Kant in Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, “The Rise of Cubism,” in The Documents of Modern Art, vol. 9, trans. Henry Aronson (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1949).

drawings of heads and caryatids that he executed and hung on the walls of his studio were preparatory studies, copies, or dreams of sculptures. He produced nearly thirty heads and two stone figures; they bear the marks of his visits to the Musée du Louvre and the museum at the Trocadéro. The visual influences are many and varied, but the drawing is clear, the line continuous, the point of view strictly frontal. If there is a synthesis here, it is not one of assemblage but one of fusion, in the sense that it was understood since the discoveries laid out in the Chimie organique fondée sur la synthèse by Marcellin Berthelot (published in 1860).4 By tirelessly repeating the motifs, of the caryatid or the head alone, Modigliani, who was an admirer of Nietzsche, was seeking to capture in the figure “le réel pas l’irréel non plus, mais l’Inconscient le mystère de l’Instinctivité de la Race” [humaine] [“neither the real or the unreal, but the Subconscious the mystery of what is Instinctive in the [human] Race”].5 The method was alchemical, the approach intuitive,6 and the image, sensual.

The Ruins of Christianity When Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906, two of the great figures of the century that had just ended were enjoying new recognition: Paul Gauguin, to whom the Salon d’Automne devoted a huge retrospective exhibition, and Paul Cézanne, who died in October and who was the object of a monographic exhibition the following year.7 The former already had his followers: the generation between Gauguin and Modigliani, that of the Nabis, had adopted his taste for distant horizons.

Frightened by developments in their world, which they saw as decadent, the likes of Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, and Émile Bernard sought in ancient civilizations and exotic religions the

4 Pierre Daix, op. cit., pp. 858–59.

5 Manuscript note by Modigliani on a 1913 drawing, reproduced in Noël Alexandre, The Unknown Modigliani: Drawings from the Collection of Paul Alexandre (New York: H. N. Abrams), 1993, p. 90.

6 Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) (New York: H. N. Abrams,

1954), p. 10: “He worked furiously, dashing off drawing after drawing without stopping to correct or ponder. He worked, it seemed, entirely by instinct.”

7 Modigliani himself presented six works at the 1907 Salon d’Automne. See Meryle Secrest, Modigliani: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 2011, p. 106.

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Jacques Lipchitz Dancer, 1913

Pablo Picasso Study for a Standing Nude, 1908

Bronze, 63.5 × 23 × 19.5 cm Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris

Graphite on paper, 32.7 × 25.1 cm Musée National Picasso, Paris

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Monumental caryatid, kneeling toward the front, arms raised behind the head, head bent forward, 1913

SCULPTURAL SOURCES

Black crayon, 43.1 × 27.7 cm Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, gift of Blaise Alexandre, 2001

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fig. 8

Hélène Guillot, photograph of the bo om of a sarcophagus from the neoMemphitic period (Lady Tenthapi mummiform interior in black basalt) at the Musée du Louvre, 1954

fig. 9

Hélène Guillot, photograph of the top of a sarcophagus from the neo-Memphitic Period (Lady Tenthapi mummiform interior in black basalt) at the Musée du Louvre, 1954

du sacré, exh. cat. p. 86.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition shown at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, May 7–August 11,

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quoted in Théories 18901910 (Paris: Rouart et Watelin, 1920), p. 12 and Philippe Dagen, op. cit., p. 201.

11 “Le Musée du Louvre,” excerpt from the Joanne

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sources of a regeneration. Like their master, they and, like Picasso and Braque, his almost monojuxtaposed Christ and Buddha8 in syncretic images. chromatic palette.

Since the rise in colonization, the word syncreAnd then Modigliani moved away from painttism was in vogue to describe attempts at crossing ing. He met Paul Alexandre and Constantin Eastern philosophies and Western esotericism, Brancusi, settled in Montparnasse, and called in a quest for a “primitive” religion that may not himself a “sculptor.” His models were the monuhave come down to us.9 The Nabis were disap- mental works of cultures that were distant in time pointed in Christianity and sought the sacred in and space. His close friends, the doctor Paul places untouched by modern civilization: “The great Alexandre and the young Russian poet Anna art, which we call decorative, of the Hindus, the Akhmatova, accompanied him in his Parisian Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the art of wanderings: to the Indochinese museum at the the Middle Ages and the Renaissance”10 formed Trocadéro, to the Ancient Greek and Ancient the bases of an essentially iconographic syncretism Egyptian rooms at the Louvre, and to the Galerie in their work.

Brummer. We do not know what specifically motiThe youngest painters, those of the genera- vated these trips, other than Modigliani’s taste tion of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and for museums, which he visited frequently in Italy.

Modigliani were more interested in the painting of Cézanne. Picasso and Braque retained his simplification of volumes, subdued palette, and The Wisdom of the Pharaohs interpenetration form and content. Modigliani, “The objects brought together in this museum who also liked Toulouse-Lautrec and James aim to present the civilization of ancient Egypt.

Abbott McNeill Whistler, was drawn particularly Its gods, civil life, funerary rites, and history are to the portraits, finding inspiration in Cézanne’s recounted through statues, caskets, and papyri, touch, framing of the subject, and brushstroke, and even ordinary utensils. The colossal dimensions of the statues of kings and queens, sphinxes, and fragments of temples give us an idea of the grandeur of the monuments of the valley of the Nile.” Thus was the “Egyptian Museum” at 8 Paul Ranson, Christ and 2008; and Marty Bax, the Louvre described in the Joanne guide to Paris, Buddha, 1890, oil on “Théosophie,” trans. published in 1912.11 The previous year, Modigliani canvas, 72.7 x 51.4 cm, B. Abraham, ibid., p. 90. visited the museum with Anna Akhmatova, Triton Foundation, 10 Maurice Denis, Gooreind-Wuustwezel.

“Définition du néowho was probably his lover. He was “crazy about 9 See Julie Ramos, traditionnisme II,” Art et Egypt” and “drew [my] head in the attire of “Syncrétisme,” in Traces Critique, August 30, 1890,

guide to Paris (Paris: Hachette, 1912), p. 6.

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Nude, frontal view, forearms raised, tattoos, necklaces, and bead belts, c. 1911

SCULPTURAL SOURCES

Black crayon on paper, 42.9 × 26.7 cm Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, gift of Blaise Alexandre, 2001

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Head of a figure of a woman, Early Cycladic II (2700–2300 BC) Provenance: Amorgos, Spedos type Marble, 9.5 cm Department of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities, Musée du Louvre, Paris

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Head of a Woman, c. 1913

SCULPTURAL SOURCES

Marble, 50.8 × 15.5 × 23.5 cm Musée National d’Art Moderne/Centre de Création Industrielle - Centre Pompidou,Paris, gift of 1993, on permanent loan to LaM, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, former collection of Jean Masurel

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Modigliani,” trans.

Djemma Bider, The New York Review of Books, July 17, 1975.

13 Henri Matisse, Écrits et propos sur l’art, compiled and annotated by Dominique Fourcade (Paris: Hermann, 1972), p. 121, quoted in Philippe Dagen, op. cit., p. 321.

14 The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, a friend of Modigliani’s, described their connection to Cubism: “I was also very conscious of the examples of Egyptian and archaic Greek sculpture. In my desire to move away from the classical and Renaissance tradition in

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look to these more ancient cultures, which also had a particular relevance to the findings of the early years of the twentieth century. . . . The Egyptians and archaic Greeks also used the multiple points of view that the Cubists adopted.”

Jacques Lipchitz and Harvard H. Arnason, My Life in Sculpture (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 25, quoted in Alan G. Wilkinson, “Paris and London: Modigliani, Lipchitz, Epstein, and GaudierBrzeska,” in William Rubin (ed.), “Primitivism” in Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), p. 427.

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Egyptian queens and dancers.”12 He wasn’t the The volumes of the body—triangular bust, only victim of the “Egyptomania” that was rife rounded abdomen, arms folded upward—are in the mid-nineteenth century. Numerous avant- distributed according to the Egyptian rules of garde artists developed an interest in African art proportion. When the model is standing, the legs through Egyptian antiquities. Henri Matisse are sometimes joined together, as in the sardescribed how, when visiting Gertrude Stein one cophagi featuring the figure of Hathor CAT. 11, FIGS. day, he saw in the window of a antique shop “a 8 AND 9. The characteristic volumes depicted in small Negro head, carved in wood, which these works are recognizable in Modigliani’s reminded [him] of the huge heads in red porphyry sketches: almost perfect circles suggest the in the Egyptian collections at the Louvre. [He relief of the abdomen and breasts, without any had] the feeling that the formal languages were modeling. This is undoubtedly the most original the same in both civilizations, however foreign aspect of these drawings: while Picasso himself they were to each other.”13 Indeed, there are played with the illusion of relief, through varisimilarities between the Egyptian reliefs at the ous hatching and shading techniques, Louvre and the Ivory Coast masks that were on Modigliani contented himself with arcs of dots, display at the time at Joseph Brummer’s gallery, boldly combining an ancient convention with which sold a mixture of Gothic, Greek, Egyptian, lines resembling those used in technical and African arts: eyes heavily lidded, and the line drawings. of the eyebrows meeting in the middle of the This is not the least of the paradoxes in forehead, emphasized by a score in the stone or Modigliani’s art at the time: despite his interest in sculpture, his works remain highly graphic. a pronounced relief CATS. 14 TO 18.

In several drawings from Paul Alexandre’s Furthermore, he was drawn to frontal treatment: collection, the face of Anna Akhmatova carries not so much the colossi of the valley of the Nile traces of this Egyptomania. Modigliani drew her as the sarcophagus paintings, and the very lowin a pose borrowing from the highly codified relief carvings on temples. In most of his drawvocabulary of the New Kingdom of Egypt. Sketches ings of Anna, the pose is stiff, attenuated only by show her kneeling, chest facing forward and legs an inclination of the head, turned three quarters in profile, a combination of several viewpoints to the side in a movement absent from Egyptian typically found in the reliefs and paintings in the art, or by a rare, classically inspired contrapposto Louvre’s Egyptian Department14 CATS. 19, 20, AND 23. CAT. 21. The symmetry of certain poses, the thick line emphasizing certain silhouettes, or the occasional, and generally monochromatic, use of color, heighten the hieratic element in his work CAT. 22. This severe, codified majesty is that of sacred art, in which Modigliani was evidently 12 Anna Akhmatova which I had been trained, it (1889–1966), “Amedeo was natural that I should seeking to absorb himself.

The Smile of the Buddha His hunger for the sacred also led him to the Trocadéro, in the west of Paris. According to Paul Alexandre’s account, it was the Indochinese museum rather than the African collections, which were not very accessible at the time,15 that interested Modigliani: “Another point: it was Modigliani who introduced me to tribal art, and not the reverse. He took me to the Trocadéro Museum, where he was in fact fascinated by the

15 See Philippe Dagen,

op. cit., pp. 377–79.

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Head of a Woman, 1912

SCULPTURAL SOURCES

Limestone, 70.5 × 23.5 × 7.6 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, gift of Mrs. Maurice J. Speiser in memory of her husband, 1950

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Anthropozoomorphic mask, Yaoure culture, Ivory Coast Wood and brass, 40 cm Musée du Quai Branly, Paris

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Head, frontal view, 1910–11

SCULPTURAL SOURCES

Graphite on paper, 31.4 × 24.4 cm Inna Bazhenova collection

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Study of a head for a sculpture, 1912 Color and graphite pencil on paper, 63 × 23 cm LaM, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, former collection of Roger Dutilleul

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Master of Bouaf lé Guro mask, Ivory Coast

SCULPTURAL SOURCES

Wood and pigments, H. 37 cm Private collection, courtesy Galerie Didier Claes

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Fragment of a funerary object: the goddess Nut kneeling, Late Period, 664–332 BC. Wood, 14.5 × 0.8 cm Department of Egyptian Antiquities, Musée du Louvre, Paris

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Caryatid, 1911

SCULPTURAL SOURCES

Oil on canvas, 72.9 × 50.1 cm Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

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Caryatid, frontal view, before 1914

Nude, frontal view, 1913

Crayon on thin paper, 42.7 × 26.3 cm Private collection, on permanent loan to LaM, Villeneuve-d’Ascq

Graphite on paper, 42 × 26.5 cm Private collection

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