Modigliani’s something dark, complicated and sometimes irrational

Like so many other painters, he discovered Cézanne on his arrival in Paris. There he also made friends with the sculptor Brancusi, who introduced him to African sculpture, which thereafter exercised a profound influence on his drawing. And from his contact with Brancusi he felt a need to carve stone himself. He was the maker of statues that were, unfortunately, never finished. To be sure, plastic art was less his medium than drawing. In 1913 he left Montmartre and transferred his anxiety and drunkenness to Montparnasse, a prowler, miser-able, full of alcohol, drugs and talent, wasting his gifts as he did his money. He never, in fact, had enough money to live. He used to sell his admirable drawings for a few sous, drawings jotted down with a disconcerting sureness, and his portraits and nudes for a few francs. He was frequently to be seen on the terrace of the Rotonde, or the Dôme, drawing portraits with an acute, rapid stroke, and then offering them to his chance models in exchange for a drink.

Then he worked in the studio of Kisling. Soutine and Pascin were his friends. He drifted from café to café and from attic to attic, occasionally finding a haven or a compassionate soul. An English woman poet, Beatrice Hastings, supported him for some time; Zborowski sheltered him later and denied himself necessities in order that his protégé might paint.

Study drawing of Cocteau.

The compatriot of Duccio, Castagno and Botticelli, Modigliani was, above all, a linearist, a draughtsman and a mannerist. Colour adds nothing to drawing in his pictures, although it is applied with accuracy and is both resonant and enjoyable. Nevertheless, Modigliani, loyal in this respect to the Tuscan tradition, expressed himself entirely through drawing, in the flexible, subtle, melodious line which for a time was perhaps excessively prized. Elegant and frail, supple to the point of preciosity, with what indulgence it curves in upon the oval of a face, turns round a shoulder, excessively lengthens a neck, accentuates a hip! And how it dominates the form and suffices for volume and space!

Modigliani answered in his own way the question raised by the Cubists. The Cubists tried to render the object in its totality by multiplication of the points of view. Modigliani was aware of the experiments of Picasso and Braque, but he was neither a constructor nor a synthesist. His intelligence was not adapted to organization and reflection. He was therefore prudent enough to refuse to join the Cubist band. He resorted to distortion rather than to invention and to techniques rather than to a coherent system.

Madame Zborowska.

Although, like the Cubists, he was indifferent to light, atmosphere and sfumato, and aspired to express tactile values and the solidity of volumes, he had at his disposal only limited means: simply and solely line. He paid tribute to modern art by adopting its canon of abstraction and inflicting upon forms the elongation, distortion, contrac-tion, disruption of axes and overlapping of planes that constitute his 'expressionism'. We can abserve the bent heads, sioping shoulders, swan necks, interminable arms, and the disproportion between torso, legs and head, and, in the head itself, the nose thinned to the extreme, the almond-shaped eyes, close-set and hollowed out, the thin and pinched mouth; observe further the nudes with frail limbs, high waist, and sinuous arabesques: everything contributes to the impression of delicate and precious distinction, rare and somewhat unhealthy, of a morbidezza that would not have been disowned by Botticelli. Modigliani can therefore not be regarded as one of the founders of contemporary painting. He found a style, both graphic and decorative, an idiom that was on the whole rather restricted, but self-sufficient and not without effect. The curves, spirals, elongations, the austerity in the midst of gentleness, nonchalance in the midst of fragility, purity in the midst of the suggestive, the Italian-ism adapted to satisfy the modern mind, the mannerism saved by a proud gravity, and finally the Expressionism held in check by a certain sense of dignity and aristocratic reserve: these are sufficient reasons to admire Modigliani but also to wish him no descendants. Modigliani belonged to the Ecole de Paris, the largest number of whose painters, foreigners, are characterised by the fact that their works betray a certain sickness of life. Modigliani, however, who suffered more than anyone, made it a point of honour to hide his pain.

Portrait of a young woman.

His laconic style did not always succeed in repressing an irremediable pessimism. But an innate pride, nobility and dignity preserved him from excessive lyricism as well as from shoddy craftsman-ship. An anxious, tense intellectualism, which he shared with numerous other artists of his day, gave his work a disillusioned tone. Rather than a new idiom, Modigliani contributed to his time a new sensation. He had in him something dark, irrational and complicated that his drawings and paintings put within the reach of a generation eager for vivid sensations and acrid pleasures.