Art Styles in 20th century Art Map

 

Amedeo Modigliani

 

(1884 - 1920)
 

Life and Work

1912 Modigliani makes the acquaintance of the sculptors Jacques Lipchitz and Jacob Epstein. His sculptures are exhibited in the autumn Salon. The English painter Augustus John buys a sculpture. By the end of the year Modigliani is once again living on Montmartre, Passage de l'Elysee des Beaux-Arts (today Rue Antoine).

1913 In spring Modigliani spends time in Livorno. He finds quarters near a stone quarry in Tuscany. In a letter he informs Paul Alexandre that he is now sculpting marble and is sending the finished pieces to Paris. Marble statues by Modigliani have, however, never been discovered.

1914 Through Max Jacob Modiglain meets the art dealer Paul Guillaume. In the next years he will lend Modigliani his support and include his work in a number of group-exhibitions at his gallery. In May/June Modigliani is shown at the exhibition "Twentieth Century Art" in the Whitechapel Gallery in London. In June he meets the eccentric English journalist. Beatrice Hastings. He will have a stormy love affair with her that lasts over two years: a period where she will be the preferred model for his portraits. When the war breaks out Modigliani is exempted from military service for health reasons. Paul Alexandre is drafted, ending the contact between him and Modigliani. Alexandre has a collection of approximately 400 drawings by Modigliani which are only made public in 1990. Modigliani begins to paint again and for the rest of his life will devote himself almost exclusively to the portrait.
 

Columns of Tenderness


 

Caryatid
1913

One can only speculate on the reasons that led Modigliani to turn from painting to sculpture in 1909. It is possible that Italy's heritage from Antiquity had made such an impression upon him even as a youth that he had even then felt drawn towards sculpture, or so claims Ortiz de Zarate, a friend who had known Modigliani since their student days in Venice. It is also possible that up to this point, Modigliani had only lacked the opportunity to pursue stone sculpture and that having moved into a studio with a courtyard he was able to devote himself to the genre. Another theory is that the stagnating success of Modigliani's painting led him to experiment in another area. Even his contemporaries do not offer a satisfactory answer to the reason for Modigliani's change of course. "He had a tremendous urge to make sculptures" is the rather melodramatic explanation of the artist Curt Stoermer. He is one of the few who described the manner in which Modigliani proceeded. "Having ordered a large piece of sandstone to be placed in his studio, he cut directly into the stone. Just as there were times when he loved idleness and indulged in it with the greatest sophistication, there were also times when he plunged himself deep into work. The morning's first rays of light already saw him with the chisel in his hand. He cut all his sculptures directly into stone, never touching clay or plaster. He felt called to be a sculptor. At certain periods the urge would come upon him. Then he would thrust all painting tools aside and snatch up his hammer." More likely than this heroic, Michelangelo-like explanation is that at this time, Modigliani - like other artists such as Matisse, Picasso and Derain, who were also sculpting - was deeply influenced by two things which led him to put his painting-tools to one side: one was African sculpture, whose beauty was discovered in the years prior to World War I, and the other were Brancusi's sculptures, exhibited at the same time as Modigliani's works at the Salon d'Automne in 1907 and at the Salon des Independants in 1908.
Brancusi had been living in Paris since 1904 and had just moved to a studio in the Rue de Montparnasse when he and Modigliani met in 1909. It is possible that Modigliani left Montmartre in this year and moved into a studio on Montparnasse in order to be closer to Brancusi. Perhaps, however, his move was just part of a trend amongst the artists in Paris. Many were fleeing the idyll of Montmartre which had become inundated with tourists. All one can say for certain is that for a time Modigliani devoted himself to sculpture in the courtyard of his studio at the end of the small cul-de-sac, Cite Falguiere. This was around 1910, a time when he produced strikingly few paintings and his mother's letters were addressed to "Modigliani, scultore". Approximately twenty-five stone sculptures and a wood carving still exist. The art criticism on this period is of differing opinions as to stylistic development and the dating of the sculptures. The one point that is agreed upon, however, is that Modigliani's sculpture phase lasted from 1909 to 1914.

Rose Caryatid
1914

The distinguishing feature of the sculpture is that it extends in three dimensions and thus always maintains a relationship to the human body. In Antiquity and in the Renaissance it was man himself who was the predominant subject of sculpture. Unlike other plastic art forms produced by the addition of material, a sculpture is produced by taking something away from the existing material, be it a block of stone or of wood. This procedure had led Michelangelo (1475-1564) to the Neoplatonic view that every stone worked by a sculptor already carried within it the resulting image; the sculptor merely liberated the sculpture from the superfluous stone. The fact that the sculptor is responsible for every single blow of the hammer and cannot later undertake corrections was for Michelangelo and for the generations of sculptors after him a question of artistic judgement, to be seen ultimately as a God-like power. When Modigliani, who, if one recalls, did not have any training as a sculptor, opted for the difficult work with stone - rejecting work in plaster, modelling clay and potter's clay as carried out, for example, by Rodin - he was intuitively seeking the connection with a noble tradition. "I will make everything in marble", he wrote somewhat pompously to his friend Paul Alexandre while he was in Italy for three months in the spring of 1913. Rather more modestly he added: "Fulfilment is approaching. But if I don't work for another two weeks, it will miss the mark."
According to the art historian Gerhard Kolberg, Modigliani's sculptures fluctuate "between a high ideal and sculptural goal and 'primitive' to archaic execution". It is, nonetheless, astonishing that from the very beginning this novice was able to impart a stylistic unity to his sculptures. Each head can immediately be recognized as chiselled by Modigliani. Seen from this aspect, it is easy to understand Stoermer's opinion that Modigliani felt it was his calling to be a sculptor.

Constantin Brancusi
Mademoiselle Pogany
1913

Pablo Picasso
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
1907

Caryatid
1913

Modigliani's phase as a sculptor began with his move to Montparnasse, a then new suburb of Paris. On the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard Montparnasse, magnificent new houses were under construction. At the same time, work was still being carried out on the underground Metro system. It has been said that Modigliani took the big blocks of stone that he used for his sculptures from the surrounding construction sites and - if one believes the story - that his wooden heads were carved from the railway sleepers intended for the Metro. Modigliani's sculptural pieces have similar dimensions and are highly rectangular, stele-like objects with almost no forms that extend into space.
At an exhibition in 1911, Modigliani showed several of these heads as a "decorative ensemble". The uniformity of the different sculptures can be explained by the fact that they were conceived to be presented together. It is not the individual work which is of importance but rather the overall view of the stone heads. In order to heighten the total effect of the ensemble, Modigliani had his sculptures illuminated in a special way. A number of contemporaries relate that he had his works lit by candlelight. With this ceremonial setting, Modigliani wanted his sculptures to make a mysterious, quasi-religious impression. If one imagines these stones, presented in the half-dark with the candlelight flickering, one immediately thinks of ritual vows, of heathen rites and myths of the past. According to reports, Modigliani referred to his sculptures as "columns of tenderness" which he wanted to see placed in an imaginary "temple of beauty". There is something poetic in Modigliani's approach to sculpture. The stone objects become akin to magic idols. Their archaic characteristics - the marked stylisation of the heads, the elongated necks, the arrow-like noses, and the eyes that are only depicted as contours - are deliberate references to the "primitive" sculptures which were at that time eliciting great attention from avant-garde art circles in Paris. Yet there is only a rough similarity between Modigliani's sculptures and the so-called Negro sculptures or cult objects of heathen antiquity, such as the sculptures of the Cyclades. There is no evidence of a concrete, formal adoption of these styles in any of Modigliani's sculptures. Their elegant reductions are a paraphrase of Primitivism. There can be no doubt, however, that Modigliani's sculptures were inspired by non- or early European forerunners. At the very least they resemble them in the generalised simplicity of their expression.

Caryatid, 1913; Caryatid, 1914; Caryatid, 1913

Stone Head
1912

In formal terms, there is a distinct tendency towards the statuary and the tectonic in Modigliani's sculptures. Apart from the stone heads of undefined beings, this finds expression in a second group of works to which Modigliani devoted himself as a sculptor, but even more as a draughtsman and painter. Modigliani's interest in the subject of caryatids shows only too dearly that he had decided to look back to Greek and Roman Antiquity, where caryatids were architectural supports taking human form. They bore the weight of the structures above them, either entire storeys or entablatures. Modigliani's three-dimensional Caryatid, today in New York's Museum of Modern Art (1914), recalls the function of the caryatids of Antiquity only in its pose. Kneeling on one leg, her other leg bent towards her body, the powerfully-built female figure has raised both arms above her head in order to support the weight which has been suggested by Modigliani in a horizontal slab. Unlike Modigliani's other heads, mostly polished to smoothness, the surface on this load-bearer has been left rough, so that the work of the hammer and chisel can be clearly discerned. In the contrast between the hewn form and the rough stone, one is reminded of Michelangelo's Slaves, and especially of his Dying Slaves in the Louvre, in which the struggle with death has been presented in the same restrainedly tortured and yet powerful gestures which also characterise Modigliani's sculpture. The original architectonic function of a caryatid as a load-bearing support is abandoned by Modigliani in favour of the expression of an attitude or pose. In his hands, the caryatid becomes the quintessential representation of a person carrying a burden. Modigliani was not especially interested in the resolution of genuine problems for the sculptor, such as body volumes and spatial effect; his focus lay instead upon the symbolic content of the figure. It is a well-known fact that archaic sculpture had an immense influence on art before World War I.

Caryatid
1914

Caryatids were used in the architecture of classical antiquity to support entablatures or other similar members. Modigliani used this motif in roughly sixty drawings and several paintings. The drawing on page 26 shows candles arranged in a wreath around the head of the caryatid. Contemporaries report that this is how Modigliani illuminated his sculptures.
 

 It was an important component in the criticism of the apparent progress of civilisation. Artlessness, simplicity, clarity and naturalness were the values ascribed to the sculptures negres and they quickly became popular collector's items in artistic circles. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the increasingly technological and materialistic world that had emerged in many industrialised nations in the course of the nineteenth century was beginning to produce counter-movements. Gauguin's retreat to the South Pacific demonstrates one extreme withdrawal from the pressures of civilisation. The other extreme was to be found amongst the Futurists, whose chief representative, Marinetti, called for a radical break from all traditions in a manifesto of 1909 and made the provocative statement that the racing-car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, one of the most famous classical sculptures in the Louvre. Both strategies - retreat and faith in progress - were based on the desire to find something new that would replace the sense of alienation with one of authenticity. When Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 he gave expression to the contempt for what was seen as the over-refined art of the fin de siecle. The rawness of this painting called traditional ways of seeing into question, while its distortions of perspective lent pictorial expression to a new view of the world. It was a view characterized by the loss of a secure spatial perspective, making the relativity of the viewer's standpoint clear to him and conveying a sense of instability. All of these typical features of Modernism in Europe - one need only recall that Albert Einstein had published the major tenets of his theory of relativity in 1905 - were depicted by Picasso and the Cubist painters in forms oriented towards the appearance of non-European sculptures.

Head of an Idol, c 2600 BC

Modigliani's work as a sculptor was enormously beneficial to his painting. It was through sculpture that he formally arrived at reduction, linearity and abstraction, the components of his own personal, homogeneous pictorial language. This is demonstrated above all by his many drawings of caryatids. Modigliani used this motif from Antiquity to develop his linear style, whereby the softly curving contours of his forms and the emphasis of the two-dimensional became his trademarks. It is very noticeable that these rounded forms seem to be a deliberate counter-position to the angular, geometric forms of the Cubists. Instead of faceted objects, Modigliani used fluid, curving lines which gave the forms their bearing and shape. In their muted colouring, however, Modigliani's caryatid pictures definitely have an affinity with Cubism. In one of the few paintings of this time, the Caryatid of 1912 (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen) Modigliani uses only brown and dark-grey tones. His technique has generally become simpler and in some passages it even seems to be deliberately imperfect. The sketch-like elements of this picture are coupled, however, with a few precise lines out of which the female figure develops, resulting in a successful contrast between static and dynamic, between open and closed. The figure has something of the dancer about her and reminds the observer of the mythological origins of the caryatids, who are said to have participated in the famous cult of Artemis of Karuai. Unlike her stone relatives, Modigliani's painted caryatid sculpture does not bear a material load and therefore does not have to be supported by a sturdy base. Her raised arms and bowed head merely "support" the upper edge of the picture and the way the figure is sitting appears strangely unstable. The figure thereby has something intangible about her. In her austere grace she is completely distanced from the real world, is at one and the same time a painting and a sculpture, a stone goddess of the beauty of painting.

When the custons official Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) once visited Brancusi's studio, he uttered the subsequently famous statement: "I see what you want to do; you want to transform the ancient into the modern." In a certain way, this judgement can also be applied to Modigliani. Unlike Brancusi, however, whose work was a radical questioning of the illusionary function of sculpture, anticipating what would later be seen as the problematic nature of sculpted objects, Modigliani's confrontation with the sculpture and forms of non-European cultures led to a lyric, backward-looking quest for "forms full of harmony and beauty". In this phase of his artistic creativity Modigliani was actually in retreat. Unlike Gauguin, he did not physically depart from his familiar, civilised frame of references. Modigliani remained in the metropolis, in Paris, but drew back from the spirit of the age and the avant-garde. Modigliani was an artist who stood contrary to the Parisian art world, who still believed in the beauty of an intact image of man and the possibility of its depiction. He did not offer any systems or theories, preferring simply to paint, draw and sculpt. The Cubist sculptor, Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973), said about his colleague: "His art was an art of personal feeling. He worked furiously, dashing off drawing after drawing without stopping to correct or ponder. In his work he was obviously guided by a completely intuitive, extremely fine and sensitive feeling, which was perhaps linked to his Italian origins and to his love of the paintings of the Early Renaissance."
Modigliani's approach to art appears removed from the sphere of aesthetic debate. His sculptures were not really responses to the challenges of the genre; rather, as their lyric description as "columns of tenderness" suggests, they arose out of a comprehensive, poetic understanding of art. It is well known that Modigliani was a great lover of poetry, that he could recite entire passages of Dante and Petrarch from memory and often did so, sometimes even while he was painting. In contemporary accounts there are repeated references to the scope and depth of his reading and mention is made of figures such as Mallarme, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Bergson and D'Annunzio. There is unanimous agreement that Modigliani could never be found without a book. Above all, he always had with him a copy of a poem by a poet whom he held in great esteem: Lautreamont's Chants de Maldoror. This poem was to become an important source of inspiration for the Surrealists. Perhaps more than anything else, it was the poetry of the nineteenth century that shaped Modigliani's understanding of art; perhaps this is why his works cannot be understood by measuring them according to the standards of the artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century. Yet when one stands in front of Modigliani's distant, stone idols and hears Charles Baudelaire's Beauty from his anthology, Spleen and Ideal, this poem sounds as if it was made for them, or - not utterly impossible - as if the sculptures were made for the poem.

Head 
1913 

Beauty I am beautiful, o mortals, a dream of stone. And my breast, where each one is wounded, turn by turn, Inspires the poets to a love Eternal and mute, like an inanimate existence. I throne in azure, like a mysterious sphinx, I have a heart of snow, as white as swans, I hate movement, it displaces the lines I never cry and I never laugh. The poets, in front of my grand poses Borrowed from proud statues, Exhaust their days in austere studies. I must fascinate these docile lovers. Pure mirrors which make all things more beautiful; My exes, my large exes with the clarity of eternity. Charles Baudelaire

Nude Bust 
1915

Standing Nude with Garden Background 
1913

Head 
1913 

Study of a Head 
1913