Books: Morning-After Artist

MODIGLIANI, MAN AND MYTH (116 pp.)

—Jeanne Modigliani—Orion ($7.50).

On various mornings-after between 1908 and 1920, Amedeo Modigliani carved and painted in Paris a few hundred works of purity, warmth and glamour. Almost all the pictures represented people he loved, but with rubicund flesh, swan necks outstretched, ski-jump noses and sightless, slanting eyes. They were men and women molded to a very private vision of how humans ought to look, a vision that only Modigliani’s power as a designer could put across and make seem beautiful. All his control was reserved for art; in life he had none.

Modigliani died at 35, of drink, hashish, poverty and TB. Two days later his mistress—and the mother of his daughter —killed herself; the child was raised by her paternal grandmother and aunt, who always spoke in reverent tones of “your poor father.” Jeanne Modigliani grew up to be an art scholar, and now she has done a prim but thorough job of sorting out her father’s miserable binge of a life.

Modigliani, Man and Myth has very little myth about it, and not even much of the man, but it is authoritative, and it contains more than a hundred reproductions of Modigliani’s paintings, drawings and sculptures. The author went to those who had known him—both “the indulgent sentimentalists, who melt as they tell of the handsome and elegant young man, so lordly, so cultivated and so exquisitely kind-hearted,” and “the intolerant, for whom the artist does not excuse the unbearable buffoon, who could neither stand alcohol nor keep away from it, the weak author of his own downfall, the boring, drunken spoil-sport.”

Gradually there emerges the picture of someone dreadfully sick and sad. Born in Leghorn of a Jewish business family, Modigliani romantically claimed descent from Spinoza. He escaped from his bourgeois surroundings into adolescence, studied in Venice, bummed in Paris, took to art. It was a spiraling fall to greatness. Living ever more loosely, he froze his style to crystalline perfection. His carvings of heads and figures look like keen white refinements of African idols—which also influenced his pictures.

For his sculptures, Modigliani stole subway ties and building blocks. Once some workers came upon him carving one of their blocks in the dawn light, and summarily built it into the foundations while he wept and stormed. For his portraits he would charge ten francs a sitting, “and a little alcohol.” His nudes were of girls that were close to him, done with restrained appreciation. “For anyone who knew only the nudes and portraits of Modigliani’s last years,” his daughter writes, the artist’s life “would seem . . . the quiet manifestation of a mild optimism.” He found peace in art only.