amedeo modigliani: the women and children in his life
Eugenia Garsin and Flaminio Modigliani had a strong sense of family and the good fortune of affluence, up until the birth of Amedeo Clemente, their fourth child, on July 12, 1884. In that year, a business crash struck Italy and the Modigliani family fortune was wiped out. Bankrupt, the family was being dispossessed of their home and belongings. According to an old provision in Italian law, authorities could not remove the bed in which a woman had given birth or was to give birth, and so the Modiglianis placed their most precious possessions on Eugenia’s bed.
It is said that at the moment authorities entered the home, Eugenia Garsin Modigliani began labor pains with Amedeo. Years later she would recount this as a “bad omen.”
In late 1908 or early 1909, Modigliani moved to Montparnasse, a bohemian section of Paris, and lived there with some interruptions until his death in 1920. The artistic community that developed in Montparnasse during the first two decades of the 20th century had a distinctive character due in large part to the number of foreigners who had settled there.
By 1913, it had evolved to a point where one writer referred to the area as a “little international republic.” Another writer that same year remarked that Montparnasse had been “invaded by numerous colonies of foreign painters.” Marcel Duchamp called the community of Montparnasse “the first really international group of artists we ever had.”
The international group to which Duchamp refers included the Spaniards Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso; the Italians Georgio de Chirico and Modigliani; the Poles Alice Halicka, Henri Hayden, Moise Kisling, Louis Marcoussis, and Elie Nadelman; the Bulgarian Jules Pascin; the Mexican Diego Rivera; the Hungarian Joseph Csaky; the Dutchman Piet Mondrian; the Americans Jacob Epstein (who became an Englishman), Stanton MacDonald-Wright, and Morgan Russell; the Russians of present-day Ukraine Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay, and Chana Orloff; the Russians of present-day Belarus Marc Chagall, Maria Vorobieff Marevna, Chaim Soutine, and Ossip Zadkine; the Russians of present-day Lithuania Jacques Lipchitz and Marie Vassilieff; and the Romanian Constantin Brancusi.
This multinational group of artists brought with them a wide range of artistic histories, traditions, and backgrounds and created a remarkably lively, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated environment. Of his own generation, Modigliani can be linked to artists Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Jacques Lipchitz, underscoring his place within the avant-garde. In fact, Modigliani rendered Matisse’s portrait in 1916 and exhibited with the artist on numerous occasions. The rich colors of most of Modigliani’s paintings demonstrate a definite awareness of Matisse’s liberation of color as an expressive force. In addition, both artists reduced their figures to essential elements.
Modigliani’s closest artistic and social affinities were reserved for the Cubist artists, especially Picasso. Indeed, Modigliani’s artistic life was intertwined more closely with Picasso’s than with any other artist’s; the two exhibited together no fewer than six times between 1916 and 1919.
To a great extent, Cubism was a reaction to photography. With photography, one was able to reproduce a subject perfectly. Cubists instead used reality as a jumping-off point or source of inspiration, breaking elements apart and taking other artistic liberties. Cubism was a catalyst to another mode of expression for almost all modern artists, including Modigliani, who eventually departed from Cubism and developed his own style.
Apart from the Cubists, many of the artists with whom Modigliani associated were Jewish, like himself: Chagall, Epstein, Indenbaum, Kisling, Lipchitz, and Soutine. Many individuals have commented on the importance of his Jewish heritage to Modigliani, including his main patron, Dr. Paul Alexandre, and one of his principal dealers, Paul Guillaume. According to both, Modigliani saw himself as a Jewish artist and felt that his art was Jewish. Jews had always respected the Old Testament teachings of not creating graven images, and perhaps Modigliani was expressing his awareness that he was part of the first major group of Jewish artists to become established in the art world.
Modigliani also closely associated with a large group of renowned writers, of whom he created many portraits. Beatrice Hastings, a South African-born English journalist, was perhaps Modigliani’s first principal lover in Montparnasse. Their relationship lasted from 1914 to 1916; in 1943, Hastings died by suicide in the English town of Worthing.
The novella Minnie Pinnikin, penned by Hastings, details the author’s relationship with Modigliani. In a letter dated September 17, 1936, Ms. Hastings described the novella to Modigliani biographer Douglas Goldring: “I tell the story [of my relationship with Modigliani] in Minnie Pinnikin, an unpublished book that I can’t be bothered about with Musso[lini] and Hitler preparing to shake hands and bust up Europe.” In that same letter, Ms. Hastings wrote: “I was Minnie Pinnikin and thought everyone lived in a fairyland as I did.” In her letter to Goldring, Ms. Hastings indirectly confirms that the “fairyland” quality of Minnie Pinnikin is an escapist reaction to the horrors of World War I.
In addition to underscoring the spirit of Montparnasse during World War I, Minnie Pinnikin provides a sense of the literary trends that Modigliani might have been exposed to between 1914 and 1916, a period during which his art matured and his signature style developed. Considered in the context of Modigliani’s critical response at the time–which repeatedly stressed the anti-naturalism of his canvases–Minnie Pinnikin helps to suggest that Modigliani was developing a proto-Surrealist art form.
Two other women would leave a significant mark on the life and work of Amedeo Modigliani. Simone Thirioux, a French-Canadian artist, had a son with Modigliani in 1917. Although Modigliani never officially recognized the child as his own, testimonials from friends make it clear that he had in fact fathered the boy. Ms.Thirioux died several years later of tuberculosis, soon after Modigliani. Their child was adopted, and may still be living today, perhaps unaware that he is the offspring of Amedeo Modigliani. No photographs or portraits of Ms.Thirioux are known to exist.
Modigliani’s final lover was an art student named Jeanne Hebuterne. The couple met in 1917 and were together until the end of their brief lives. They had a daughter together in 1918, and Ms. Hebuterne was nine months pregnant with a second child by Modigliani when, despondent over Modigliani’s death on January 24, 1920, she leapt to her death from the fifth-floor window of her parents’ Paris apartment. Their daughter, also named Jeanne, was raised by relatives. She became an artist and art historian–studying van Gogh– and wrote an important biography of her father in an attempt to weight fact over fiction. She died in 1984.
Given the births of Modigliani’s children in 1917 and 1918, it is not surprising that children and young people became common subjects in the artist’s work between 1918 and 1919. His paintings of this period show incredibly well Modigliani’s signature style; the figures have the same glow and spiritual quality found in works by Renaissance masters, which Modigliani would certainly have seen during his studies in Florence. The paintings also demonstrate his interest in a new, unexpected source: non-Western art. Modigliani’s children often have the same small eyes, pronounced eyebrows and round faces found in Oceanic masks. Like African masks, they can also be found with empty, hollowed-out eyes. This feature serves to give the works a mysterious allure.
In these poignant portraits, Modigliani gives children a monumentality, a grandeur, a nobility never before seen. He elevates children and young people in importance and in doing so extends the portraiture tradition; previously, portraiture had been reserved for the wealthy and powerful. Modigliani had become, in a sense, “the people’s painter.”
Of all the Montparnasse artists, Modigliani had perhaps the widest range of artistic sources: Archaic Greek, Egyptian, African, Oceanic, Khmer, and Medieval influence mingled with elements of Renaissance, Symbolist, Fauvist, and Cubist art. Other sources of inspiration were French, German, Italian, British, and American literature, as well as the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. He used this wide range of influences to modernize and update the Western portrait and nude traditions, and the practice of sculpture.
Modigliani was the quintessential artist of Montparnasse, that tiny area–about a mile square–which seemed to transform the artists who moved there. The editors of a special Montparnasse magazine, published on the tenth anniversary of the artist’s death, discussed Modigliani’s special place in Montparnasse history: “While he will always be the handsome, tempestuous painter, a passionate and unconventional man, Modigliani has become, with the posthumous admiration of thousands, the center of religion, so to speak. He shined, he suffered and died, but not without leaving us a legacy. His legend is essentially the cornerstone of Montparnasse.”
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