Every city has its moment. When Amedeo Modigliani left his native Livorno in Italy in 1906, Paris was the only place to be. The success of its 1900 exhibition had lured writers and artists from all over the world. Though London, Berlin and New York all had their charms, the French capital was unrivalled. Modigliani knew it; so did his fellow artists Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Chaim Soutine. And unlike more northern, uptight cities, Paris’s licensing laws were relaxed. “Modi”, as his friends called him, could drink till dawn and frequently did.
Montparnasse, where he lodged, was the messy, drunken and bohemian quarter that Hemingway would later depict in his memoir of 1920s Paris, A Moveable Feast, which was published after his death. He described a world in which F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound would drink in cafes such as Le Sélect, Brasserie du Dôme, La Coupole and La Rotonde. One young woman, a lover of the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, observed the Montparnasse scene closely and wrote that she witnessed “Debauchery unlike anything I had seen before… I was so ashamed and revolted that I wept”.
Mixing in such circles, Hemingway certainly knew all about Modigliani, painter, party boy and priapic legend, who died just before the American writer pitched up. But Hemingway heard about his famous rivalry with Picasso. Both men were small, dark and desperately attractive to women. Once, Picasso, searching for a canvas to work on, picked on a Modigliani painting he had bought and proceeded to paint over it. Covering it thickly, he produced a still life with a guitar and a bottle of port. It was like dancing on his grave – without waiting for him to die.
Had Modigliani, the arch-boho, hung on instead of succumbing to drink, drugs and tuberculosis at the age of 35, he would certainly have taken his place alongside Picasso in the memoir. His racy life merited it. Here was an artist who defied all conventions of sexual morality, who proclaimed he wanted to paint the “mystery of the instinctive in the human race”.
In his short career, Modigliani produced some of the most alluring nudes of the 20th century. One of them, Reclining Nude (1917), sold for $26.9m at Christie’s in New York. Sensuous and earthy, these women have been likened to the Playboy centrefold. They are nothing like the classical nudes of Botticelli or Titian that he studied as a young art student in his native Italy. Confident and direct, Modigliani’s women gaze out of the canvas at you as equals. They are never demure. Never virginal.
And these paintings, which so shocked the world immediately before and during the first world war, are among the reasons the Royal Academy is mounting a retrospective of Modigliani next month, which focuses on the women in his life. Many of the pictures have never been seen in Britain before.
Beautiful as his paintings are, his work has often been obscured by the shocking facts of his life, which appear like scenes from a splatter movie. As Simonetta Fraquelli, the curator of the show, says, Modigliani sounds like the “Pete Doherty of the art world”, the bad boy who immersed himself in drink and drugs. Not content with hashish and cocaine, he also drank a potent form of absinthe known as mominette, made from potatoes. Highly hallucinogenic and toxic, it is now illegal. He downed it like Ribena. He was so sexually appealing that, although he treated women badly, his charm always lured them back for more. After one vicious argument he threw one of them through a window. Another he cut with glass, scarring her for life. And two days after his premature death, his heavily pregnant girlfriend threw herself out of a window, killing herself and their unborn child.
As a myth-maker and promoter of the live-hard, die-young-and-leave-a-beautiful-corpse way of life, Modi was without peer. Like Van Gogh, to whom his life has been compared, he died poor and unknown. Only after his death did the cult begin and his work soar in value. Not one but two of his lovers committed suicide after his death, contributing to the idea of him as a cursed artist. He loved it that his nickname, Modi, rhymed with the French for cursed, maudit. He shares his last resting place in Père-Lachaise, the world’s most fashionable cemetery, with Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. Does it get any better than this? No wonder that when Hollywood embarked upon the art-house film Modigliani, directed by Mick Davis, last year, it chose Andy Garcia, a swarthy and swoony Latin lookalike, to portray him. As the studios would find out, the truth really was stranger than fiction.
If his life was exciting and creative, it was also squalid and lonely. Born in Livorno to wealthy parents of Jewish descent, Modigliani grew up in a comfortable, bourgeois household. His father was a businessman; his French-born mother was intelligent and cultivated. The youngest of four children, he was small and sickly. His doting mother arranged for him to have drawing lessons and saw his early promise. When he developed TB, then incurable, in his teens, she took him to the warm south, where she hoped his condition would improve. It was in Naples and Rome that he first saw the masters of the Renaissance that so captivated him. Studying art in Livorno, Florence and Venice, he moved to Paris at 18 to continue his classes, lodging in Montmartre. His modern heroes were Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne and Degas, and in Paris he could meet like-minded people. But he was quite unlike many of the artists he mixed with. Fluent in French, he could appreciate the poetry of Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire, and he revered Oscar Wilde.
Like Wilde and other artists of the day, Modigliani saw himself as an outsider, a man apart. As Fraquelli explains, he was influenced by the German philosopher Nietzsche, who promoted the idea of the artist as superman: “He believed that the artist was a chosen one, blessed with gifts, and who is yet tormented by them at the same time.” That meant that he was freed from the constraints of middle-class morality. As the painter Maurice Vlaminck wrote, echoing this idea, “One is born a painter, as one is born a hunchback. It is a gift or an infirmity.”
Of course, reading Nietzsche and reciting Baudelaire could not pay the bar bills. Though his mother sent him money, he frittered it away toasting absinthe friends. Together with Utrillo and Soutine, Modi would later be grouped with them in a school of art called “les peintres maudits”, a reference to Verlaine’s poetry.
He must have felt cursed when he had no money to buy wood for the stove and it was too cold to paint. During his 14 years in Paris he lived at no fewer than 30 addresses – none of them smart. One account has him buying insecticide to sprinkle on the floor to guard against bedbugs, cockroaches and rats. Another told how Soutine, a Russian Jewish émigré, had been suffering from earache for some time. When he eventually consulted a specialist, he found a nest of bedbugs living in his ear canal. Meanwhile, Picasso, who was similarly poor when he arrived in Paris, once ate a filthy sausage that his cat had found in the street.
It was hunger that led Modigliani to women. Not only sexual hunger, but the kind of pangs that made your stomach twist in pain. His first patron, Paul Alexandre, a doctor who championed young artists, said that Modi’s lovers would take pity on him and buy him supper. And some clever restaurateurs, like the proprietor of the Rotonde cafe, would often let Modi pay for meals in drawings.
