Cursed Painter

The boy was just 14 years old, and spindly, when typhoid fever struck him. Lying abed, in the ghetto of Leghorn, Amedeo Modigliani raved about Italy's long-dead Renaissance, and confessed to his own longing to paint. His mother heard, and promised to send him to art school.

Eight years later, when Modigliani turned up in Paris, he was still not much of an artist, and it was already obvious that his time was short. His lungs were bad. A black-eyed, elegant young fellow, he kept to himself, painted furiously, and destroyed most of it as he went along. Soon Matisse, Picasso, Utrillo and Brancusi took him up, introduced him to cubism, African sculpture, and cafe life. The combination freed him from his academic inhibitions: he began painting pictures that were worth keeping. Then he set about destroying himself.

In Death, a Legend. Hashish and women interested him enormously, but he liked alcohol most. He traded off his fashionable clothes for one baggy, brown velvet suit, and took to staggering up & down the steep streets of Montmartre, drinking wine and coughing blood. He and Utrillo would wander into bars, introducing each other to the drunks inside as the "greatest painter in the world"; when the cops came, Modigliani would be carried off, excitedly reciting Dante to the uncomprehending constabulary. Head-wagging Parisians called him the peintre maudit (cursed painter).

Except for a few artist friends, no one thought much of his work. The one exhibition of his paintings was a fiasco. But when he finally died at 36, in the Hopital de la Charite, 25 years ago this week, Paris flocked to his funeral. An endless cortege of artists and models followed the hearse to the cemetery. Along the way gendarmes, who had arrested him with painful regularity, saluted the flower-decked coffin.

By last week Modigliani the man was half-forgotten, but the artist was in the news again. An exhibition of 31 of his portraits and seven of his nudes was packing Parisians into the swank Calorie de France. Paintings which he had once sold for the price of a few drinks were valued at 1,000,000 francs. Said an art critic of L'Ordre: "Modigliani became a legend the day of his death. Everyone was bewildered at not having encouraged, supported, foreseen his genius."

Ski Nose, Swan Shoulders. One of the best canvases in the show was Modigliani's portrait of his mistress Jeanne Hebuterne (see cut), who, big with child, committed suicide by jumping from a fifth floor window, after Modigliani died. From her wide, red-skirted hips to the top of her brown hair, the artist had turned his mistress into a slow, serpentine spiral, given her an other-worldly beauty which would be horrible in real life. Like El Greco, Modigliani liked to stretch people out of human proportion. He graced Madame Hebuterne with the neck and shoulders of a swan. The small, vacant eyes and ski-run nose looked less than human, gave her face the blank, melancholy look of an African mask.

With its monotonous repetition of elongated people in looping, arabesque poses, the show was far from the Renaissance art that the feverish boy had dreamed of reviving, but it had a life of its own.

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