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Modigliani at Tate Modern
Assistant curator Emma Lewis on the Italian painter's life and how his story resonates through this new exhibition
Modigliani’s art has immediate and enduring appeal. But his relevance is also connected to the fact that his story still resonates today: a 21 year old who moves from the provinces in Italy to the capital of France, and suddenly finds he has the freedom to experiment, to absorb culture and new ideas, to meet diverse, interesting people from all over the world. He plays with his identity, and allows the city to shape who he becomes.
His story – and how it is reflected in his art, as he experiments with different styles (like cubism) or different media (like sculpture, a lesser-known but hugely important part of his practice), to ultimately find his own way – is the one that we tell in our exhibition.
Although he counted Picasso and Constantin Brancusi among his friends, Modigliani tended to look beyond his peer group for artistic inspiration. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and especially Paul Cezanne were important early influences. (Modigliani reputedly kept a reproduction of Cezanne’s 1889 painting Boy in a Red Waistcoat in his pocket.) He was influenced by displays of Cambodian, Egyptian and Ivorian art as well as artifacts that were becoming fashionable in Paris at the time.
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Their influence is evident in his sculpture, and it is from here that he arrived at the most distinctive and immediately recognisable style that we see in his paintings: he elongated bodies into columns, reduced faces to an oval, and often painted eyes as blank almond shapes. Asked by the painter Lepold Survage why he painted him with one eye closed and the other open, he said: ‘because you look out at the world with one eye, and into yourself with the other.’
Modigliani’s nudes modernised figurative painting, but they also proved scandalous, due at least in part to the presence of pubic hair. Allegedly this impacted negatively on the only solo show of his work that he lived to see, an exhibition held in 1917, at the Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris. There, according to Weill’s memoirs, a painting spotted by the police commissioner who lived opposite caused sufficient fuss to scupper the whole enterprise. Shocked by the 'hairs', he forced Weill to take the paintings off the wall and the show was effectively brought to an end.
However, as the journalist Francis Carco surmised in the journal L’Eventail in 1919, such versions of events were exaggerated; the exhibition in fact continued to run and there were even a few buyers.
Evidently, Modigliani’s brief life left his biography open to speculation and myth. We can perhaps gain the best sense of who he was as a man from contemporary accounts by those closest to him. During their turbulent relationship, writer and editor Beatrice Hastings often included insights about Modigliani in her newspaper column about Paris. In 1914 she wrote: "The Italian is liable to give you anything you look interested in. No wonder he is the spoiled child of the quarter, enfant sometimes-terrible but always forgiven – half of Paris is in morally illegal possession of his designs. 'Nothing’s lost!' he says, and bang goes another drawing for two pence or nothing, while he dreams off to some cafe to borrow a franc for some more paper!"
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Modigliani was blighted by ill health most of his life and he died in 1920 at the age of 35. Despite the scandal of his 1917 show, it represented a breakthrough in his career, and, supported by deeply devoted friends, Modigliani achieved success in the last few years of his life. By the time of his death, he was an internationally renowned figure and was laid to rest in the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. A long funerary procession that included the era’s most famous artists was held through the streets of Montparnasse, Paris.
EMMA LEWIS is assistant curator of the Modigliani exhibition at the Tate Modern. 23 November 2017 to 2 April 2018; tate.org.uk
