Bad Boy Of The School Of Paris

By Richard Lacayo

Even people who don't know much about art can tell you something about Amedeo Modigliani, the dissolute wild man of Montparnasse, wolfishly handsome, penniless, tubercular, drinking his way toward an early grave while sweeping up his superabundance of lovers, the last of them Jeanne Hebuterne, the art-school student who was carrying his child when he died and who would take her own life the next day. It's no surprise that there's a movie of his life on the way, starring Andy Garcia. The surprise is that it took so long.

The lure of Modigliani's pinwheeling life may help to explain the long lines outside the Jewish Museum in New York City, where "Modigliani: Beyond the Myth" opened earlier this month. (It remains there through Sept. 19, then moves on to Toronto and Washington.) But the famous charm of his art is the other explanation. He settled early upon a formula of powerful appeal, a convergence of fastidious lines and abstracted facial features, of intimacy and enigma, that made modernism inviting, even comfortable. He didn't dynamite the human form as Picasso did or distill it to its essence like Matisse. In Modigliani's work the figure doesn't look aggressively, truculently modern. Modernized is more like it, gently conformed to what would turn out to be the ever emerging middle-class notion of newness.

Intelligently done all the same. His reputation is firm enough, but like Marc Chagall, Modigliani is one of those artists who have always been more popular with the public than with critics. His charm can seem too creamy sometimes, his legend so large it starts to overwhelm the output of his brief life. The Jewish Museum show, which was organized by curator Mason Klein, seeks to complicate our understanding of Modigliani. For one thing, it argues that each of his portraits is a signpost of the outsider, that Modigliani's art is the outcome of his position as a stranger in the Paris art world, an Italian and a Sephardic Jew in a France where the air was still poisoned by the Dreyfus affair. ("I am Modigliani, Jew" is how he sometimes introduced himself, especially after he got his first taste of French anti-Semitism.) Even if you don't entirely buy Klein's thesis that the masking and unmasking of unresolved identities was at the heart of Modigliani's intentions, the show, with its suave canvases and its powerful ensemble of carved limestone heads, is a reminder that Modigliani was not just every bit as beguiling as we have always thought him to be but also better, deeper.

He could be a difficult man. "As inhuman as glass" is how he was once recalled by his friend Max Jacob, the gay French poet and Jewish convert to Catholicism who also insinuated himself for a time deeply into the life of Picasso: "Everything in [him] tended toward purity in art. His insupportable pride, his black ingratitude, his haughtiness." But Modigliani sprang after all from a proud and unconventional family. He was born in the Tuscan port town of Livorno, a cosmopolitan city where Jews had lived freely since the Renaissance. Educated and progressive--his mother shocked her in-laws by starting a private school; his socialist brother was jailed for his political activities--his family had once been prosperous as well. But by the time of his birth, in 1884, they had been reduced to poverty by the failure of his father's businesses.

Sickly almost from birth--pleurisy, then typhoid, both of them preludes to the tuberculosis that would kill him in 1920, at age 35--Modigliani became consumed by art as a child. In his early teens he quit school to study drawing full time, and in the years that followed he would study painting in Florence and sculpture in the marble quarries of Carrara. By 1906 he was ready for Paris. It was by then the cockpit of modernity, the Paris of Picasso, Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck. Some of the first canvases in this show are portraits of women painted in Modigliani's earliest style, a gaunt Expressionism bearing all the signs of Edvard Munch and Picasso's by then discarded Blue Period, undertaken with broken brushwork learned from the canvases of Cezanne. It's competent, even sometimes a bit chilling in that entertaining woman-as-vampire mode of Expressionism. All the same, it's derivative of styles and psychological preoccupations that the Left Bank was leaving behind.

Soon enough, so was he. Paris would place before Modigliani its full arsenal of new ideas. Like Picasso, he would make a crucial encounter there with African wood carvings. Their wild distortion of the human face and figure would point him in a new direction--for one thing, toward the asymmetrical almond eyes, sometimes painted without pupils, that became one of the signature tropes of his portraiture. Unlike Picasso, he used African sculpture not as a route into his fears and sexual obsessions but as a much more benign vocabulary of forms that could be joined with other influences to produce--and overproduce--his enigmatic, spiritualized faces. Over the next few years he would learn to borrow as well from the simplified language of Cambodian stonework, early Christian statuary and the geometric abstraction of ancient Cycladic sculpture.

Although his weak lungs made it hard for him to lift a hammer, Modigliani initially thought of himself as a sculptor more than a painter. Three years after his arrival in Paris, he would meet Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor whose search for simplified line and form would touch something deep in Modigliani. It was through his sculptures in particular, nearly all of them totemic busts like Head of a Woman from 1912, that he would arrive at the sign system that he carried back into painting--ovoid heads on elongated Mannerist necks, with the nose a long, sharp fuselage and the mouth a pert slot just below it.

Given the Sturm und Drang of his life, you would fully expect Modigliani to draw like Egon Schiele, tormented figures tied into knots by their own perplexities. Instead he deployed the most serene line in the whole School of Paris, a line that stretches back four centuries to the elongated figures of Pontormo and Parmigianino. Modigliani came to Paris not only as a Jew but also as an Italian, steeped in the art of the quattrocento and the High Renaissance and their Mannerist aftermath. You find the sources of his poised, limpid line in the elegant whiplashing of Botticelli and the Madonnas of Simone Martini. And that quizzical tilt to the head that you see in his 1919 portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne? It descends from the canted heads--a sign of humility--in Renaissance depictions of the Virgin.

The show ends with the nudes that were the subject of the only solo exhibition that Modigliani had in his lifetime. Something about the way they combined simplified figuration with frank tufts of armpit and pubic hair shocked even Paris. The gendarmes were alerted and closed the show down. You won't have to worry about that now. You'll just have to fight the crowds.