Art Styles in 20th century Art Map

 

Amedeo Modigliani

 

(1884 - 1920)
 

Nothing But a Mute Affirmation of Life

 

1918 was the fourth year of war. Food was in extremely short supply. Gas and electricity were rationed and the inhabitants of Paris had to learn to live with the terror of air raids. On January 30, the Germans bombed Paris with fifty fighter planes and caused inconceivable damage. In March, they began to move from the north-east towards Paris; the city was shaken by explosions and there were deaths among civilians. It was feared that there would soon be an advance made on the French capital. Evacuation measures began, and in April almost half a million people were on their way to the safety of the south.
Modigliani also left Paris in the spring of 1918. Together with the Zborovskis, his friend Soutine, and his new mistress Jeanne Hebuterne, he went to the South of France. Over a year passed before Modigliani returned to Paris, to spend the last months of his life there. In this year of turmoil at the end of the war, Modigliani painted like a man possessed. In the bright light of the Cote d'Azur he produced most of the paintings which would later become his most popular and highest-priced works. There are portraits of strong farm boys and thin servant girls, of sweet children and old grandpas, of worldly women and elegant men and, above all, there is always Jeanne. In the last two years of his life, Modigliani painted her no less than twenty-five times.
Modigliani's pictures from the South of France depict people who agreed to model for him. The anonymity of the majority of the subjects underlines a tendency towards the typical and general, a tendency which distinguishes these pictures from the portraits of the Paris years. The Peasant boy is not really the portrait of an individual boy, portrayed in his uniqueness, but more a prototype country boy. This is demonstrated by the rejection of any anecdotal details referring to the boy's life and in the almost archaic rendering of his face. In Modigliani's Paris portraits, one can see that the artist had almost a caricaturist's eye for the physiognomy of his subjects; in these later portraits he is aiming for smoothness and stylisation. The pale blue of the open eyes harmonises with the other colours in the picture, which in its entirety emanates an agreeable calm and simplicity.
Indeed, Modigliani was never so close to his model, Cezanne, as here. If one compares Modigliani's technique in these pictures and their compositional outline, however, it is true that they do not have very much in common with Cezanne's pictures. As we have already seen, Modigliani's portraits develop out of drawing. This is also the case for these painterly, almost fresco-like paintings of peasant boys, which develop out of the unity of the softly rounded contours.

Boy in a Blue Shirt 

Yet the motifs Modigliani chose for these pictures display the indisputable influence of Cezanne, perhaps sparked off by Modigliani's geographical proximity to the French painter's place of origin, Aix-en-Provence. They confirm the high esteem in which Modigliani held the Frenchman. Modigliani is said to have always carried around a reproduction of Cezanne's painting, Boy in a Red Waistcoat, ever since visiting the Cezanne retrospective in Paris in 1907, and whenever Cezanne's name was mentioned, he would take it out and kiss it emphatically. Modigliani was quite aware of his closeness to Cezanne. He is once supposed to have said to Soutine: "Cezanne's figures, like the most beautiful statues of antiquity, do not see. Mine, in contrast, do. They see, even if I have not drawn their pupils. But like Cezanne's figures, they want to express nothing but a mute affirmation of life."
The Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg once described Modigliani's work as the "great gallery of people", a homage to human existence. That might sound rather dramatic, but the exclusiveness with which Modigliani devoted himself to the portrait, as well as his concentration on rendering simple human presence, does give rise to the fundamental question: what are Modigliani's pictures actually about?
Alongside about four hundred drawings from the Alexandre Collection, a note recently became public that Modigliani made in his sketchbook in 1907. "What I am seeking is not the real and not the unreal but rather the unconscious, the mystery of the instinctive in the human race." Modigliani wrote this on an otherwise empty page of his sketchbook. Noel Alexandre, the son of Modigliani's Paris friend and patron, calls this statement Modigliani's artistic credo. Modigliani's art, exclusively devoted to the human portrait, aspires towards the creation of a realm beyond realism and symbolism. Terms such as "the unconscious" and "the instinctive" were key concepts for two intellectual movements which, at the beginning of this century, would fundamentally alter our perception of man. These were the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and, probably far more important here, the philosophy of life first expounded by Friedrich Nietzsche.
One of the most famous exponents of this philosophy was the Frenchman, Henri Bergson. From various contemporary sources it is known that this poet-philosopher was one of Modigliani's preferred writers. In his main work, Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson's concept of "elan vitale" (life-force) was his response to the rationalistic, deterministic understanding of life. This understanding was vitalistic and dynamic and for the first time in the history of philosophy did not rest upon a priori objective categories but rather on the individual's subjective experience. According to the optimistic view of Bergsonism, the individual becomes the creator of his own life. For this philosophy, the experience of the self in time lies beyond all rational premise. At the beginning of this century, this philosophy gave birth to an entirely new understanding of man and existence and made a lasting impression on many artists. One suspects that Bergson's concept of duration, removing the way that man experiences time from accustomed mathematical references, or his expositions on the "creative waiting" in which the development of the self is carried out, had no small influence upon Modigliani. The "instinctive", which was for Bergson the opposite of rational knowledge, and the "mute affirmation of life" of which Modigliani spoke to Soutine, are the first indications of the link between artist and philosopher. This link is obvious in those Modigliani figures who seem to be beyond individuality in their removal from all external categories and activities. The activity in which they are portrayed can also best be described using a concept such as "waiting". Turned inwards, Modigliani's figures sit with their hands folded in their laps, gaze with heads bowed towards either the right or the left, have time, are embodiments of the concept of duration and are completely withdrawn into themselves.

Girl with Braids 
1918 

Young Girl in Beret 
1918 

Little Girl in Black Apron 
1918 

Modigliani's sojourn in the South of France also brought about a few stylistic changes. He used brighter colours; his brushwork became looser and the surface of his pictures less smooth than in earlier Paris years. Modigliani also tried his hand at landscapes on the Cote d'Azur, something he had last done as a very young man. The resulting paintings offered typical views of the region. Once again, the comparison can be made with Cezanne, but this time it is really only the Provencal motif and the palette which call up a similarity. In their treatment, in the contrast of softly rounded forms with static elements, Modigliani's landscapes recall more the work of Andre Derain.
There is almost no written documentation of the year that Modigliani spent in the South of France. Even his otherwise loquacious Parisian contemporaries knew too little about this period to be able to embellish it with details, Modigliani probably lived first in a hotel in Cagnes-sur-Mer and later moved even closer to Nice. It is here that Jeanne Hebuterne gave birth to a daughter on November 29, 1918. She was given the same Christian name as her mother. Modigliani's daughter was illegitimate but there is a document dated July 7, 1919, in which Modigliani promises to marry his fiancee, Jeanne Hebuterne, "as soon as the papers have arrived". Modigliani was not given enough time to carry out his intention. After the death of her parents in January 1920, the child Jeanne was raised by Modigliani's sister in Florence Jeanne Modigliani, who died in 1984, wrote an important biography of her father, Modigliani: Man and Myth.

Beatrice Hastings 

Beatrice Hastings Standing by a Door 

Beatrice Hastings

Beatrice Hastings 

Beatrice Hastings Leaning on Her Elbow