The Iowa Review
Volume 36
Issue 1 Spring
2006
Eros Modigliani
David B. Morris
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Article 37
DAVID
B. MORRIS
Eros Modigliani
"Life is a gift, from thosewho have it and know it to thosewho don't have
it and don't know it."?Amedeo Modigliani
Only one man in Paris knew how to dress, said Picasso, and that was
Picasso, who dressed up like a college professor, perhaps
Modigliani.
meant
to diminish
but
his rival with a backhanded
compliment,
art carry extended
in the era of modern
and uncoverings
crime
The
with
which
Picasso
reproached him
single
significance.
once
a life remarkable for acts worthy of self-reproach?was
self?in
coverings
during his early years of poverty in Paris to paint over a Modigliani
canvas. Art historians
have repeated this effacement, methodically
is under way, as suggest
the work of Modigliani.
Change
neglecting
ed by several blockbuster Modigliani
century. Auction prices
twenty-first
exhibitions
at the start of the
for paintings un-saleable
before
in backhanded
continues
his death are sky-high. Yet, the effacement
lined
that
the
crowds
outside
the Jewish
reviews
up
implying
to
for the 2004 Modigliani
show in New York still manage
the Jewish
get it all wrong. Popular art critic John Hughes
reviewing
in crisis at the idea of a truly popu
Museum
show seems almost
is
lar modernist.
work, he writes with rapier disdain,
Modigliani's
art
much
modernism."
for people who don't
like
"modern
Museum
Modernism
in art was
invented
to Gertrude
then
Stein)
in pre-World
"was where
War
Paris, and Paris
the twentieth centu
(according
swan
ry was." Itwas also where Modigliani
painted his distinctive
on
As
necked portraits that resist the Cubist assault
representation.
the Montparnasse
evenings passed deeper into alcohol and drugs,
a moment
arrived when
the impoverished
young Italian painter?
to
the bearing of an aristocrat or prince, as many said?began
remove his clothes. Maybe
it was at Maria Vassilieff's,
where
the
Russian painter (who had studied with Matisse)
converted her sec
with
into a canteen, offering painters a cheap refuge and
tourists a venue for sampling Parisian bohemia. Modigliani
the long red scarf
stand upright and began by unwrapping
ond-floor
giving
would
coiled
studio
around
his waist
in the style of French workers.
His
trousers
149
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a
slipped down to his ankles as he pulled up his shirt, displaying
torso. An eyewitness
slim white
heard him saying: "Aren't I hand
I look like a god?"
some? Don't
Then
beloved
heated
came
verses
from Dante,
the poet-hero
of his
from Les chants de Maldoror,
the over
late-nineteenth
century
by an obscure
name
under the
Lautr?amont
and van
recited
Italy. Or passages
prose hallucination
French
poet who published
a trace, casting a spell on Rimbaud,
ished without
at war with
A cynic-outlaw
the
Surrealists.
(later)
Baudelaire,
and
deco
bourgeois
spoke for the torment that friends such as sculptor
in Modigliani.
"A dark fire," Epstein wrote,
Jacob Epstein observed
"lit up his whole
When
fueled
the fire often
being."
by alcohol,
rum, Maldoror
turned
self-destructive
His brooding
temper and scorn
of tubercular coughing, made him an
and violent.
ful laugh, cut short by bursts
erratic companion.
He also pointedly
avoided
the usual caf? art
to
and
discuss
literature
he was a
talk, preferring
philosophy. While
certified public nuisance, many women
found him irresistible,
and
none
of
his
he returned their passion.
nudes?which
Significantly,
over
three dozen paintings?is
male.
him
him
in
who
well
called
knew
Modi,
Everyone
indistinguishable
from
of
cursed
dark
the
and
doomed
French
maudit,
signature
spoken
romantic artist in the line of Baudelaire and Nerval, although IModi
number
is also the short
("The Ways" or, in English tradition, "The Postures")
erotic sonnets and engravings, recovered (after their
title of notorious
in the early twentieth century.
burst of fame in the Italian Renaissance)
Modi's
Parisian
intimates
preferred the nickname
Modi's
striptease would
such as the mystic poet-painter Max Jacob
that his family used, D?do. All knew when
begin, late at night, at an almost measurable
sometimes
seize him
Friends would
intoxication.
stage of hashish
or
and tie up the red scarf. His excess, brooding,
just plain drunken
Itwas Picasso who asked
ness, contained an element of performance.
to be drunk in
why when Modi was drunk he always just happened
caf?s La Rotunde and Le D?me.
front of the artist-haunt,
tourist-stop
Like inebriation performed by an artist who is in fact inebriated, the
calculated uncovering of the body?whether
through artful striptease
or painterly
nudes?served
as a ritual that gestured
and utterly beyond calculation.
for Modi
toward
something primal, Dionysian,
in January 1920, when
Several years before his death at thirty-six
Modi was visibly or invisibly dying of alcohol, hard living, poverty,
150
installed him in
and TB, his friend and art dealer Theodor Zborowski
a studio and commissioned
nudes that (according to Jean Cocteau)
he painted "ceaselessly." The nude, as an exercise inWestern
paint
ing, is as academic as the still life, but these ceaselessly painted nudes
or potboilers.
are no academic exercises
the female
They uncover
a
male
what
do
reveal?
basic
but
Why, beyond
plea
they
body, true,
sure in women's
artists
bodies, am I so drawn to them? Renowned
whose
work Modi
knew well?Botticelli,
Titian, Ingres, Degas?have
me
far less, so artful female
that
interest
painted masterly
I click past internet come-ons
can't explain my response.
nakedness
nudes
as tawdry, depraved, or exploitative. What
nudes their mysterious
Modi apricot-toned
power?
This question
occupies me stretched on the cement
that strike me
Museum
Guggenheim
as a nondescript
an hour
treasure
warehouse?a
brick building?where
nude.
alone with a Modigliani
gives
these
floor of the
fortress
concealed
has given me
In the echoing
industrial
the curator
a
I lie on my side beneath
etiquette
required,
and
from
the
inches
creamy
away
sunny window,
surprisingly
rough
a necklace
painted textures of a woman with eyes closed, wearing
space,
no museum
that only emphasizes
Sir Kenneth Clark,
but
influential
and utter nakedness.
on the male
focusing
between
distinction
Amedeo Modigliani. Nude
Solomon
her serene
R. Guggenheim,
nude,
nudity
a bogus
and
(formal/static)
introduced
(Nu), 1917. Solomon R. GuggenheimMuseum. Gift,
1941.
151
which Modi's
(erotic/kinetic),
painting blows away. The
an
erotic signal. Who gave it to her? If she owns it, for
necklace sends
strand of jewels?which
whom does she wear it? Or, is this modest
it
that
the
interrupts?sheer
self-expression:
highlights
uncovering
nakedness
an innocence
like the necklace,
painting,
gaze (given the tradition of
But male only? Closed eyes
are a recurrent feature
the sign of an interior state,
alike are
either sleep or dream, to which
buyers and interpreters
feminist critics would
the old
shut out. First-generation
emphasize
in
narrative
and
which
of
dominance
the
submission,
phallocentric
of auto-eroticism?
Modi's
likely a male
art market).
inModi's nudes,
predicts an admiring gaze,
the nude and the gendered
artist
the unclothed
female model
and codes
exploits
as
art
Recent
masculine.
feminist
historians
gaze
clothed male
the
find
spectator's
this explanatory
is more
reductive.
narrative
as I gaze,
of
asymmetries
Modi's
nude,
lesson in the historical
than just another
or models
that transform biological women
into the passive
vir
of
male
desire:
earth
mother,
tropes and metaphors
oppressive
sex goddess. My response
seems irreducible
gin, whore,
showgirl,
or objectifying women, which
to a male need for dominating
I really
power
brings me
back
significance when we recognize
to a series. Modigliani
thinks in series. The series
them
however,
try to avoid. It raises the question,
to these mysterious
Modi end-of-life
nudes.
I. ENSEMBLE AND EROS: THE NUDES
Modi's
nudes
assume
of what
AS A SERIES
added
as belonging
is his
basic unit of composition,
and
Portraits,
homogeneous
ongoing.
not only dominate
his work?unique
for example,
among mod
ern painters?but
also (as their well-known
a series. The series is to Modigliani
constitute
or style
is to Picasso.
attest)
the period
asked what school or style his paint
replied that they were "Modiglianis."
When
to, Modigliani
ings belonged
As serial compositions,
Modi's
portray?all
bear
underlying
numerous
aegis
152
coherence.
unrelated
of a non-genetic
what
matter
portraits?no
as Modiglianis,
resemblance
family
reveal
similarities
underlying
lectual Jean Cocteau
similarities
(from upper-crust
to unidentified
lower-class
Even
the
notorious
historical
contemporary
family resemblance.
whom
and
they
their
intel
Right-bank
a certain
workers)
swanlike
necks put
under
the
persons
As
I gaze at the necklaced
Guggenheim
an absent or silent ensemble.
ing itwithin
early series of hieratic
nude, then, I am also see
as with his
The ensemble,
heads, alters my sense of the single
exhibition of 1912, for example, displayed
limestone heads in a semicircle. The catalogue
multiple Modigliani
describes
them as T?tes: ensemble d?coratif Together
they lose their
limestone
work. The Salon d'Automne
art works and appear
single or individualized
an
like archaic gods from
unknown
religion, as one
to other
resemblance
instead more
some of the indi
Jacques Lipchitz encountered
in the courtyard of Modi's
studio. "He explained to me,"
them as an ensemble."
reports, "that he had conceived
critic called
them.
vidual heads
Lipchitz
The ensemble
nature
of Modigliani's
nudes has gotten
lost in
or
the
of
impact
meaning
ideological
concerning
specific
or painter
Is a woman
for a photographer
undressed
from an active, free subject into a passive,
subjugated
questions
paintings.
converted
have added the idea of a
theorists
object? Recent
post-colonial
to
"colonized"
female body represented
by men and thus unable
own
women
its
truth.
Small
wonder
that
artists
resist,
speak
today
disfigure, or reject painterly traditions of the female nude. InModi's
condemnations
of the female nude issued not from
day, ideological
or from anti-imperial
feminists
thinkers but from male painters,
in Paris, the Italian Futurists.
from
his
especially
artist/countrymen
to sign their manifesto,
declined
pointedly
published
the painterly
traditions
linked nudes with
1910, which
"We
that they hated, even as they loved the new age of machines.
in
"as
the
nude
the
manifesto
painting,"
proclaimed,
fight against
nauseous
and as tedious as adultery in literature." It demanded
for
Modigliani
in April
a "total suppression"
of nudes in painting. Modi's
series,
on
Futurist
within
the
moratorium
nudes,
ten-year
painted
a resistance
to ideology: a sustained defiance of mecha
represented
ten years
well
nism
and domination.
an ensemble,
the unobtainable
As
firsthand,
to limit
nudes resist any program
Modigliani's
eros.
as
of
Erotic
Modi
knew
pleasure,
play
includes multiple
gazes. Alice Prin, the runaway baker's
and post-1920
superstar model known as Kiki, described
apprentice
"All he did was
her own view of Modigliani:
me shiver from head to foot. But wasn't
writer-critic
was
Francis
no less erotic
Careo
owned
in his response.
growl; he used
he gorgeous!"
several Modigliani
"I had these nudes
to make
French
nudes
in my
and
home
153
I loved_"
Carco's pas
like a love," he wrote,
"they were women
his
and
constrained
historical
moment,
sion, however
gender
by
of
the
response
my reasonably
straight wife,
oddly approximates
who finds Modi's
nudes seductive
and sees in them a post-coital
across time and gender raise another question
glow. Such responses
relevant to Modi's
series of nudes. Who
has the right to legislate
the limits of pleasure? How can we understand?not
legislate out
or dismiss
of bounds
(straight,
pleasure
series of sensuous
as bad faith?a
gay, or rainbow
female bodies?
pleasure or a man's
in
queer)
gazing at Modigliani's
Such questions
led me inescap
woman's
power of eros.
ably to the boundary-crossing
and
the
archaic
Eros,
divinity
ruling spirit behind Plato's Symposium,
to hierarchies.
is antithetical
"bitter
Sappho's
repeated
epithet
as does her other epi
sweet" suggests
its power to blur boundaries,
in which
is lost. Connoisseur
thet "limb-loosener,"
self-control
of
eros Anne Carson lists the metaphors
that classical poets commonly
melting,
crushing,
piercing,
bridling,
apply to erotic experience:
roasting,
stinging,
biting,
grating,
cropping,
poisoning,
singeing,
"is expropriation.
He
and grinding to a powder. "Eros," she writes,
robs the body of limbs, substance,
integrity and leaves the lover,
eros
less."
also triangulates
the lover
desire,
Through
essentially,
in a three-figured
and beloved
where
the
third
geometry
figure
loss, or lack. Painting,
spectator, desire: Modigliani's
contact with
and category-rend
the limb-loosening
eros.
of
Desire
in ways
circulates
the
ing power
through
paintings
that neither artwork nor critic can contain,
like the erotic impulses
not only
where Kiki famously
circulating
through Montparnasse,
wore no panties but also turned public cartwheels
in order to dis
is obstacle,
nudes make
tress exactly the same bourgeois
culture that strives to keep eros in
No
line and under wraps.
she said, also gave her the same
panties,
to piss outdoors.
Like festive comedies,
freedom as male drinkers
eros embraces
opposed
Erotic
crosscurrents
to constitute
flowed
154
and
the hierarchies
threatening
dynamic.
Paris as
Modernist
through
art. When
of twentieth-century
asked to
and
Picasso
art,
replied that
sexuality
suite of prints known as "Raphael and La
between
explain
they are the same. His
Fornarina"
so freely
that subvert
a fluid basis
the difference
model
and pleasures
and thus
freedoms
to its uncontainable
(1968)?based
lover?depicts
on the theme
in explicit
of Raphael's passion for his
a legendary paradigm of
detail
watching
(Picasso often includes the Pope as voyeur
a Picasso avatar,
as Raphael, here doubtless
crosscur
and fornicates.)
The transgressive
sexual play.
artist/model
open-mouthed
paints
simultaneously
rents of eros take a less sexually-explicit
inModi's nudes,
redirection
which allude to works in the tradition of high art, such as Giorgione's
Sleeping Venus ana Titian's Venus of Urbino. Venus as goddess of love
in the background
of most Modi nudes,
lending
of contemporary women. Their
force to his representations
flesh-and-blood
radiance is the antithesis of marble classicized
chill,
even as their repose (often via sleep or dream) appears temporary, a
hovers
somewhere
a mythic
posture rather than a frozen pose. The nude in this complex
of suspended
radiance corresponds with Modigliani's
claim
bestows
life as a "gift." Life, in this way
that the artist somehow
its presence not through a pulse but through
of thinking, signifies
transient
moment
an intensified
awareness.
state
Awareness
represents
heightened
of being. In bestowing
this awareness,
the artist bestows
however,
a mixed gift. Modi was well known for saying that he wanted
a life
say, through a bar
Intensity is achieved, we might
to Anne
gain with death. The classical geometry of eros, according
as
we
views
from
lack:
desire
desire
Carson,
inseparable
only what
brief but
intense.
we do not possess. The desire basic to eros thus opens up within
the
an
can
awareness
since
of
fatal
intensified
life
flaw,
gift
inescapable
not exclude an awareness of death, and the intensity may in fact be
on
predicated
a
II. RETHINKING
silently
self-destructive
pact.
EROS
Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard offer cross
in a rethinking
twin
of eros. Librarian
and
generational
peaks
amateur sociologist
turned theorist of the unthink
ground-breaking
between
able, Bataille based his lifework on a distinction
sexuality
French
theorists
is a natural drive.
Sexuality
sex
to reproduce. Humans,
needs
backbone
an erotic life. Erotic
to
create
animals
only
and eroticism.
a
Every animal with
are the
by contrast,
is too
life for Bataille
into a tamed and utilitarian
reproductive
sexuality.
eros
in contact with a wildness,
turmoil,
puts humans
Unbetrayed,
He
and violence
from
and
death.
describes
orgasm
inseparable
as "assenting
to life up to the point of death." Death for
eroticism
outer
limit where eros stages the assent to life:
Bataille is thus the
often
betrayed
a gratuitous
expenditure
of
sexual
energies
beyond
any
rational
155
or gain. A generation
soci
of production
later, postmodern
with
of
links
his
Baudrillard
critique
capitalist production
ologist
an unexpected
sexual liberation.
critique of so-called contemporary
calculus
resists what he sees as the tyranny of the newly liber
sex is reduced to yet
ated orgasm in its rush toward climax, whereby
term for the return
is
his
Seduction
another utilitarian
technology.
as a feminine
that subverts
reintroduced
of eros?eros
principle
of control.
and
utilitarian
various masculine
strategies
principles
Baudrillard
(re) productive
Francis Careo
hijacked to serve utilitarian,
a traumatic
inserts
seduction
of desire
economies
Within
ends,
pragmatic,
opposition.
his room in
reports that the concierge who cleaned
a Modi
she discovered
the Quai aux Fleurs "almost fell dead" when
nude on his wall. The Paris police proved equally hostile. The Modi
of her gallery
in 1917 hung in the window
nudes that Berthe Weill
show drew such crowds that the police com
for his only one-man
across the street sent an officer to demand
she remove
missioner
the street to ask why. "These nudes," he sput
Weill
closed the show.
h-h-hair!"
have
tered, "they
nudes is an explicit, forbidden,
The pubic hair on Modi's
sign of
as
civil
threatens
eros, and eros (as the commissioner
recognized)
of eroticism," writes
business
well as individual order. "The whole
them.
She crossed
character of the participa
Bataille, "is to destroy the self-contained
lives." Its business
also includes
tors as they are in their normal
or
As
Bataille
adds:
life.
normal
disrupting
destroying
deeply
"Stripping naked
Bataille's
key
eros?represents
action). Action
is the decisive
action."
the sign of
is that nakedness?under
insight
less a condition
than an action (or the result of an
nudes reflect an agency all
is what matters. Modi's
frequent repose or stillness.
life. They
character of ordinary
the self-contained
They challenge
uncover what beyond the body has been covered up. In this sense,
traditions of ideal form than
less to painterly
nudes belong
Modi's
eros. His full-breasted
encounter with
to the un-ideal,
disruptive
the more
subversive
for the woman's
space that lies some
images occupy an eroticized
The erotic, it
and fantasy woman.
artist's model
into undecidable
to emphasize,
does not dissolve
disputes
warm-blooded
where
in between
is crucial
taste. Like pain or
or questions
about subjective
definition
of beauty, the erotic is always inherently a subjective
the perception
or solely subjective. The erotic is con
state, but it is not merely
about
156
to biological
in historical
semantics, which
It
is
in
also
inherently trans-subjective.
regularly anchored
action
cultural narratives. One especially
important
performed
by
a
its
of
is
of
series
nudes
subversive
removal
narrative
Modigliani's
nected
drives
and coded
are both
set free from
female nakedness
Spectators must experience
resources of story.
the confining and explanatory
Modi's nudes, just as they resist the posture of timeless classical
refuse to cover their nakedness with
bodies,
implicit narratives of
frame.
or self-display. The absence of narrative
is as
degradation,
from story
impudent as the presence of pubic hair. The detachment
in placelessness.
into
dissolve
is mirrored
swatches
Backgrounds
shame,
as if to defeat narra
and garments
grow indistinct,
as
cannot be explained by narratizing
tive. Nakedness
the women
or
or
as
in
Manet's
much-storied
oriental
slaves,
prostitutes
Olympia
of rich color
in a hotel where
Grande Odalisque of Ingres. Prostitutes
Modi stayed, knowing he was too poor to afford models,
sometimes
to
customers
him
for
after
their
Careo) voluntarily
posed
(according
the brazen
never transform models
into whores,
unlike
left, but his paintings
Picasso's Damoiselles d'Avignon, which practices the shocking distor
in some sense
tions of cubist style upon women whose
profession
is never for sale
explains their status as objects. Eros inModigliani
narrative that Modi's
but resists the commercialized
cash-strapped
in
Les onze milles
friend Apollonaire
the
tale
explored
pornographic
it "amasterpiece.")
vierges. (Picasso declared
associates
Narrative
also
nakedness
tradition
starting
compatible
Modigliani
Jewishness
at
with
sin and shame,
is
nakedness
of Eden, where
unshamed
a
state
innocence.
with
of theological
only
pre-lapsarian
in Catholic
France sometimes
asserted
his
defiantly
am
at moments
of open anti-semitism?"I
Modigliani,
the Garden
norms of
defiantly outside bourgeois
as
as
remain
inno
unnarratized
either
they
decency, just
cent or guilty. They are rather deliberately
This
storyless.
storyless
ness is often regarded as a fault. "Modigliani nudes were
to raw
Jew"?and
Christian
his nudes
stand
to nature: red
palm-court
jungles were
sexuality what Rousseau's
in tooth and claw," art critic Hughes writes
in derision.
"They look
artificial wil
charmingly artificial." Modi admired Henri Rousseau's
dernesses,
which
contemporary
with sexuality,
also defeat
r?cits of sexual
raw or cooked.
narrative
and he declined
explanation,
is not identical
Eros, however,
of its traditional
Stripping nakedness
rawness.
157
narrative
invites
cover, Modigliani
spectators
between
to confront
the subtle
eros and death.
separable relationship
in Modi's
and eros are constant
life
Death, women,
companions
and art. His adoring mother
nursed him back to health from near
death as a child, feeding too his love of art. He knew his tubercular
but insistent,
lungs would kill him, regularly spitting blood as he painted the nudes,
cigarettes and rum close by his palette. He was drawn to self-destruc
tive acts, like the two hours shortly before his death he spent exposed
in a cold January drizzle. A late photo shows the clean-shaven
artist
now a bearded, hollow-eyed
out
of
figure
Dostoevsky's
underground.
or an emblematic
in his art is not a faint abstraction
Death
skull.
eros and death
Rather,
are intertwined
in the nudes
like strands
of
Two days after he died,
DNA,
through
his wife in all but legal form, leapt to her death
Jeanne H?buterne,
in her parents' home, killing also their unborn child.
from a window
con
Raw sexuality is simply one more facile myth in the post-Sadean
their
invoked
struction
of desire.
structures,
EROS
AND
soon
is set free from nar
endings,
and mythic
DEATH
of sexual
The Dying Animal
education
too
nudes
from all narratized beginnings,
but it is not set free from death.
narratives
Modern
novel
in Modigliani's
liberated
rative,
III.
Eros
interrelations.
of middle-aged
for the sexual
liberation
(2001), which
stand behind
unfolds
Jewish professor
of the
revolution
Philip Roth's
erotic
the continuing
Born
David Kepesh.
1960s, Kepesh makes
a
lost
time
Consuela.
for
ex-student,
up
by seducing
willing
They
an
intense
of
erotic
until Consuela
experience,
begin
exploration
initiates a breakup. Six years after the breakup,
she sends him a
an image from the Museum
of Modern Art:
Nude.
Modigliani's
Reclining
Does Consuela,
intend the image as an invita
Kepish wonders,
is momentarily
tion to resume their erotic play? His question
side
postcard
reproducing
tracked by his attention
... the
cylindrical
stalk
to the picture:
of a waist,
the wide
pelvic
span,
and
the gen
tly curving thighs, by the patch of hair that marks the spot where
she is forked?by the trademark Modigliani nude, the accessible,
?
A nude repre
elongated dream girl he ritualistically painted
sented with her eyes closed, defended, like Consuela, by nothing
158
Amedeo Modigliani. Reclining Nude (Le Grand Nu), ca. 1919.Digital Image ?
TheMuseum ofModern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
other
than
her
erotic
power,
at once,
like Consuela,
elemental
and
elegant. A golden-skinned nude inexplicably asleep over a velvety
black abyss that, inmy mood, I associated with the grave. One long,
undulating line, she lies there awaiting you, still as death.
is dying of cancer. The appear
Kepesh does not know that Conseula
ance of Modi's Reclining Nude serves as an ironic, unrecognized
turn
moment
It
marks
the
when
erotic
Roth's
self-absorbed
ing point.
hero must
awaken
to the underground,
inescapable
link between
eros and death.
eros and death does not disrupt
An underground
link between
to Modi's
the pleasures
intrinsic
"dream girl" nudes,
including
the pleasures
of fantasy, but the hint of death turns the pleasure
bittersweet. The bittersweetness
of eros, as
phrase)
evokes it, helps account for the melancholy
that many
Modigliani
see in his work. The union of love and death, while
commentators
consistent with certain forms of melancholia,
is a tragic theme that
(in Sappho's
subject. He was
"To do any
of a model.
upon the presence
strangely dependent
must be
work," he claimed, "Imust have a living human being?I
able to see him before me." While
human form is accessible
through
underlies
Modigliani's
fascination
with
the human
plaster casts, "living" models
bring life, with
ties, into the studio. In return, the artwork
all its erotic possibili
bestows
the
for Modi
159
gift of life upon spectators. The nudes endorse an erotic power that
an authentic
sees as making
Modi
aliveness.
possible
"They were
women
I loved," Careo wrote of his Modigliani
"and I felt
nudes,
a
alive beside them." By contrast,
portraits
subgroup of Modigliani
are
individuals
who
and
husks
missing
depicts
rigid
expressionless:
link between
the spark of eros. In the nudes, the underground
and death is ultimately
unlike
these
life-affirming,
dry husks
of life, life leaking away, eros visible
represent the subtraction
in traces left by its departure.
to strain or over-read
It is not necessary
ing for underground
are never
wholly
hints
individual
nudes
eros
that
only
seek
In a series,
individual works
a network
but exist within
of
of death.
self-contained
Modi's
nudes required a series in order
relationships.
to explore the wide range of eros, from a woman whose
necklace
a
to
sends undecidable
sexual
whose
look
bor
signals
playmate
ders on the unmistakable.
intertextual
A version
a depiction
of this painting
appears,
the studio
that Modi
of
briefly
Biale
in
like a signature,
with Moise
shared
Judaism,
Kisling.
embraced
celibacy
Jew) both rejected
out, never
points
as a spiritual value, and Modigliani
(a secular
some
of
the
flesh
and
holds
kinship
privations
with
of erotic Kabbalism.
the traditions
as
almost
historian
David
Amedeo Modigliani. Nude on a Blue Cushion,
National
160
Gallery
of Art. Washington,
D.C.
One
observer
approaching
1917.Chester Dale Collection.
his hut-like
waist,
with
at night
her hair down,
studio
saw a woman
in a kimono,
nude
in
the moonlight,
madly
and
leaping
yelling, was
dancing
in
clad
her
trousers,
opposite
only
like Modi.
"Then," the observer
says,
kimono
and the two danced
"the woman
dropped
to the
and
faun
her
nude."
Eros, as we have seen, is not all pagan delight. Modi's
affair with
the ambitious,
hard-drinking
English journalist
tooth-and-nail
included
bodies
battles,
Hastings
flung
difficult
Beatrice
through
smashed, so that friends felt relieved when he
the wispy, docile Jeanne H?buterne,
with
whom
windows
and bottles
replaced Beatrice
Modi painted often but never nude, nor did he let her pose nude for
other painters. "When awoman poses for a painter," he insisted, "she
gives herself to him." Sex between painter and model was common
is not for Modigliani
but the give-and-take
exclu
or
a
If
sexual.
model
Modi
him,
displeased
sively
primarily
reportedly
the poison
that
features, as if exposing
any bourgeois
exaggerated
was
eros.
term
his favorite
of abuse.
interfered with
Dirty bourgeois
in Montparnasse,
reflect his belief in the erotic body as a source of values
accretions. Nakedness
from bourgeois
removed a layer of
falsehood
and social death. The Japanese painter Tsuguharu
The nudes
cleansed
public
so body-cen
in a manner
Foujita reported that Modigliani
painted
tered as to seem "orgiastic": "he went through all sorts of gesticula
tions, his shoulders heaved, he grunted, he made grimaces and cried
out, you couldn't come near." The faithful Zborowski, who supplied
rum, and a small monthly
studio, paint, canvas, models,
allowance,
was banished whenever Modi worked on a nude. The nudes express
an eroticism
central
toModi's
to his passionate
Death, we might
say, takes
is the bodily death?redolent
and central
central to his own act of creation,
struggle against bourgeois values.
work,
two forms
in Modigliani's
art. There
as basic
represents
a
is also, however,
There
which
death-in-life,
bourgeois
his nudes so deeply resist. As a genre, the nude of course traffics
of sex?that
he
to eros.
in nameless
ought
unlike
women.
to think:
Picasso
It's a nude
put it frankly: "If I do a nude,
not Madame Whatsit."
Modi's
people
nudes,
or
personality
seem disconnected
his portraits,
from distinct
and
eliminate
the ethnic details
character,
they mostly
In
creating the nudes, Modi often dismissed
typical of the portraits.
to finish the work
his models
later from imagination.
The model
individual
thus serves
less as a personal
referent?Madame
Whatsit?than
as
161
a living conduit
for eros: a power that flows through bodies without
individual
character. Eros did not require
necessarily
expressing
are
not
In their preoc
but
the
nudes
context-free.
names,
naming
assume
set
added significance when
realm
of
life
from
their
contemporary
against
inseparable
creation: the slow-motion
inferno of mud, blood, gas, and
bourgeois
known as "the great war."
bayonettes
with
cupation
the nudes
eros,
another
IV.
EROS,
War
AND
WAR,
fever
BEING
in Paris and Modi's
ill-health led Zborowski
accelerating
to take a small entourage of more desperately
impoverished
painters to southern France, so that even when Modi
temporarily escaped wartime Paris his escape was predicated on war.
The Paris crowds shouting "To Berlin, To Berlin" in August
1914 soon
in 1918, nearly
broke,
gave way to casualties
mate on the Western
straggling back from the bloody trench stale
front. Veteran, gourmand,
and beloved poet
wore a huge white bandage on his head as he cir
critic Apollonaire
culated among Montparnasse
Modi's
mobilized
Parisian
Francis Careo. Cocteau
A
disappeared.
curfew?9:00
included Modi. Among
friends, which
were
friends
writers Andr? Salmon and
joined an ambulance
p.m.
for
cafes
unit. Picasso
and
10:00
p.m.
discreetly
for
restau
into an evening ghost town. The British
Montparnasse
for fifty months.
Trenches
shouted
(so close that enemies
rants?turned
fought
terrain for 25,000 miles. The
insults) zigzagged across waterlogged
new diagnosis
"shell shock" entered the medical
lexicon and popular
at
in
six
the
1918,
Somme, British forces took
speech. During
days
was
casualties. This
mechanized
300,000
killing on an unprecedent
ed scale. It is the unseen
Modi
but was
had no use
nudes.
landscape of Modigliani's
for this war. One report says he tried to enlist
for poor health. Another, more
in character, says
in line for an hour he walked off in a rage. His pol
that after waiting
resembled
the radical socialist
itics, when not downright
anarchist,
was
a
Socialist deputy in Italy) that found no
(his brother
position
rejected
two vast armies of the bourgeoisie.
difference
between
significant
a
One contemporary,
alert to his self-contradictions,
called Modi
him
"violent pacifist." Another
"Down
report quotes
shouting:
was a
with the Allies! Down with the war!" The war for Modigliani
death
trap opposed
escaped his notice,
162
to everything his art stood for. Itwould not have
if he saw the poster, that nudity and pubic hair
did not cause civic disorder
or mass panic when
state and its war machine.
of the nation
His wartime
to
opposed
to
any reduction
as yet
because politics
it opposes.
Instead, the
to paint nudes?a
choice
and the love of machines?resists
choice
Futurist
dogma
a political
slogan
another bourgeois
already
the war!")
("Down with
institution
is partly what
a counter-route
in which
female
nudes
explore
is vulnerable
what
The
exaggerated
stripped bare?finds
in support
enlisted
nakedness
evokes
and infinitely valuable: human being.
nakedness
of Modi's
nudes?the
nude
in effect
its corollary not only in the pubic hair that
scandalized
the police commissioner
but also in less visible
links
we
as
when
ask for the naked truth.
between nakedness and veracity,
The
closed
or blanked
eyes
in so many
of Modigliani's
nudes and
while
portraits,
evoking
from late-medi
precedents
eval
Siennese
sculpture
to
African
contemporary
are consistent with
masks,
the view
convey
that his paintings
that
imperative
an
awaken to their
spectators
own blindnesses.
The non
that mat
literal blindnesses
ter most
all associated
with
failures
to live?failures,
that
eros. The nudes, with
eyes often
Edouard
Bernard.
Honor
to the
75TH,
1914.
Frenchposterfrom World War I. Biblioth?que
de documentation
internationale
contemporaine
(BDIC) et mus?e d'histoire contemporaine.
shut
dream, suggest
in the spectator
beyond politics
what Heidegger
later would
are
to Modigliani
is, of
their
in sleep or
blindnesses
that extend
or erotics
to
a few years
call the truth of
perspective on being, that
being. It is significant, from a philosophical
it both as un-forgetting
when Heidegger described truth he described
as
Like the nude, it shows us what in the con
and
un-concealment.
text of bourgeois
life we have both forgotten and concealed.
a
as
is notoriously
resistant
Being,
persistent
topic in philosophy,
to an empirical or scientific discourse
of clear and distinct
ideas.
163
to
else may define it, is defined by its invisibility
Being, whatever
and data. Skeptics will
reductive
fact, mass,
languages of matter,
can
the questions
refer
but
it raises
what
to,
question
being
possibly
are rich with
to contemporary
to
philosophers
possibility
willing
consider
the paradox of religion without
religion. "The anonymous
current of being invades, submerges
every subject, person or thing,"
Levinas at the close of World War II, meditating
writes Emmanuel
on what
would
be
left if the entire world
peared. "It is like a density
of silence. There is nothing,
friend Max
mystical
seek the personality
then itmay
he is perceptive,
Modi's
did not
of data suddenly disap
of the void," he writes,
"like a murmur
a
is
but there
field of forces."
being, like
Jacob said that Modigliani's
portraits
but the "soul." If Jacob is as correct as
be useful to return to the discussion
of
soon made central to continental
philosophy.
being that Heidegger
art maintains
to explore
in
is whether
for Modigliani
The thought
a privileged
relation with being.
his nudes, as it did for Heidegger,
in 1935 the
delivered
Fifteen years after Modi's
death, Heidegger
that eventually
His complex
lecture
of Art."
that depicts
a worn
saw print
meditation
in 1950 as "The Origin of the Work
focuses on Van Gogh's
painting
"Van
of
shoes.
peasant
pair
Gogh's painting,"
"is the disclosure
of what
the equipment,
the
explains,
Heidegger
into the uncon
pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. This entity emerges
Van
in
this analysis,
of
its
Like
cealedness
being."
Gogh's painting
sets out to oppose
the forgetting of being:
Heidegger's
philosophy
so total that we not only fail to remember being?what
a forgetting
also forget that we have forgotten. We are sleepwalk
is?but
being
ers. "The art work opens up in its own way," Heidegger
says, "the
Being of beings." Or, as Modi might have put it, life is a gift from
it and has it) to the sleepwalkers.
the artist (who knows
we accept this
encounter
with the Being of beings?if
Modigliani's
what
links his por
language as at least a provisional metaphor?is
coincides with the
traits with his nudes, where being in its mystery
where
truth is unconcealment,
stripping
body, where
is inescapably erotic?a
naked is the decisive action. Being for Modi
can help us see how
from Heidegger.
clear difference
Yet, Heidegger
a site where eros momentarily
its
makes
the nudes might constitute
naked
female
In this sense, eros and being belong together. Modigliani,
appearances.
on
an armistice
to live when
had just thirteen months
conflict
of
world
the
ended
11,1918
powers:
unprecedented
however,
November
164
and shell-shocked.
dead, 21 million
gassed, maimed,
with
that followed such carnage did not fill Montparnasse
was
old
that
the
gone.
spirit
complained
over 8 million
The peace
joy. Many
in the cold days of January 1920 registered
The death of Modigliani
like a Shockwave. Modi had spent his best years in Montparnasse,
tramping its back streets, camping out in its crazy studios and gar
rets or, back to his old vagabond existence,
grabbing a place to sleep
a near
(as one acquaintance
put it) "here, there, anywhere." Despite
absence of buyers and living in abject privation, punctuated
by sprees
of wild generosity when he came into cash, he somehow
kept on
painting works that everyone except the dealers recognized
dinary, meanwhile
selling sketches for drinks, ripping up
a
when
caf?-patron offended him by asking that he sign
scholars have shown that he sold more paintings in his last
as extraor
the sketch
it. Recent
years than
fits the myth of total neglect. Myths and facts alike fail to predict what
had never seen such a funeral.
happened next. Montparnasse
never
funeral," wrote Jacques Lipchitz.
forget Modigliani's
so
friends,
many flowers, the sidewalks crowded with peo
ple bowing their heads in grief and respect. Everyone felt deeply that
had lost something
very essen
Montparnasse
precious,
something
"I will
"So many
in the funeral cort?ge included some of the
friends walking
greatest artists of the century?Picasso,
Kisling, Salmon, Ortiz, Jacob,
the
Brancusi, Vlaminck, Derain, and (his personal gift to Zborowski)
the
coach
Sou
tine.
covered
Modi's
Flowers
carrying
incomparable
tial." His
corpse, courtesy of his absent brother, the Socialist deputy back home,
who cabled the instruction to bury him like a prince. The police who
so often had run him in during his drunken public spectacles now
stood at attention
as the cort?ge passed.
to the attentive
reference
"D'you see?" said Picasso in
of the commissioner
representatives
police,
outrage had shut down Modi's only one-man show three years
earlier at the Berthe Weill Gallery: "Now he is avenged."
whose
V.
DREAM
AND
FANTASY
produced only a single self-portrait, and it does not depict
Modigliani
a torment-driven outcast, Maldoror-Modigliani,
but rather it shows the
artist at work, holding a palette, a gentle man with closed eyes and a
dreamlike expression. Dreams and dreamlike states are prominent too in
the nudes. There is no evidence that Modi knew Freud's argument that
dreams
are psychic wish-fulfillments,
the residue
of repressed
sexual
165
the Surrealists soon filled Paris with Freudian dream
desire. Although
frank
and
sexual confessions, Modi's nudes float free from neu
analysis
narrative. Desire appears indefinitely deferred
rosis and psychoanalytic
or past the state of satisfaction: the opposite of repressed. Its traces are
women
visible even in its surprising absences?voluptuous
suspended
zone of absolute erotic serenity.
in a space free of fleshly urges?a
nudes?which
include an
Indeed, Modi's
dreaming or daydreaming
eyes-open full-frontal figure titled significantly The Dreamer?are wholly
unlike Freud's pale, agitated hysterics. Their main scandal lies in seem
ing to express the utter health of dream or fantasy. The fantasies may
dominion
well bear a masculine
code, since men have long maintained
over fantasy both
to one prominent
in artistic production and in everyday life (according
cultural critic). Fantasy, however, is also often coded
to military-industrial
and monetary
dreamlike
nudes
occupy an ambiguous
production.
allure while also affirming
ground where nakedness holds a masculine
than
the
feminine,
(rather
transgressive power of fantasy. This
deriding)
in that its reveries (Roth's
is
ground
especially complex
ambiguous
if derisively,
female,
material
in contrast
Modi's
"dream girls") lie so close to the bodies of flesh-and-blood women. Are
they fantasies or models? Real or imagined? Or does their power extend
to undermining
the assumptions
behind such binary questions?
Paris. "Only dreams,"
Dreams were
serious
stuff in Modernist
wrote
the editors in the inaugural issue of La R?volution Surr?aliste,
four years after Modi's
death, "lead men down the path to free
dom."
still unregulated,
shared with dreams and hashish
as
a
creative
conduit of free
the reputation
power. Modi's
contempo
rary, former addict Cocteau, wrote against the myth that opium was
Opium,
a source
"Opium," he corrected the record, "nourishes a
to sleep, exalts the heart
It puts the emotions
half-wake
the spirit." The half-sleep
posture of many
of visions.
state of half-dream.
and lightens
of Modi's
nudes
an opiate-like
suggests
eros from emotional
turbulence. There
dream
state
that detaches
is no doubt
that Modigliani
ends: the character
in pursuit of artistic
and opium
to a hashish
necks in his portraits he once attributed
in a dreamlike
vision. The nudes not only depict women
state, how
a
dream images offered as
ever, but also constitute
life-giving gift
used
hashish
istic swanlike
introduced
Modigliani
teenth-century
166
world of the bourgeois.
a
to the many painters
bears
kinship
surely
with
France who
shared a fascination
into the dreamless
in nine
dreams.
theories of dreams, as art historian Nancy Locke has
a rich resource for French visual artists. Among
these
Pre-Freudian
shown, were
Le
theorists, Alfred Maury argued in his well-known
pre-Freudian
are marked
not
sommeil et les r?ves (1861) that dreamlike
fantasies
is how
from external realities?which
departure
by an extravagant
the surrealists
to the contrary, by an uncanny
dreams?but,
in the light
is external and real. Modi's
nudes,
in
dreamlike
transformations
which
the
suggest
marked
to what
closeness
of Maury's
theory,
of eros absolutely
depend upon (rather than erase) their
to real women.
The interplay requires a tension
closeness
real and dreamlike are hard to disentangle.
fantasties
uncanny
in which
in her memoirs,
the irrepressible Kiki. As she explains
a distinctive
feature that, for modeling
assignments,
disguised with
Consider
she possessed
she sometimes
refers, coyly, to a
slice of pubic
visibly
hair. Foujita,
for whom
she
and
her
about
it,
posed,
joked
it an ines
lover Man Ray made
She
crayon.
absent
photograph.
There
is no
posed
chills
in an
presence
capable
early
that Kiki
record
for Modigliani,
and warm
but
her
response
do not
("Wasn't he gorgeous!")
an
absence
of
desire.
suggest
several Modi
Certainly,
represent
strangely
as poet
"offset
twats,"
Blaisdell describes
it.
Distinctive
as
nudes
triangle as
or askew:
the pubic
decentered
a
Gus
this odd
signature,
constructs
these
as
irregularity
Modi
nudes
doubly
declassicized
both
un-ideal,
a conjunction
and deformed,
of
dream image and of Kiki's erogenous
do not edit out distinctive
fat, but emphasize
Man Ray. Kiki de Montparnasse,
192.1.Man Ray Trust/ADAGP-ARS/
200s?
Telimage,
zone.
from
In general, Modi's
teeth
marks,
the shifting line between
to breasts
dream
nudes
to rolls of
and real.
167
Amedeo Modigliani. Reclining Nude. Collection Mattioli, Milan, Italy. SCALA /
Art
Resource,
One
NY.
line in Modi's
erotic dreamscapes
is firm: women, with only
appear facing the viewer. Modigliani
famously dis
"But monsieur,"
he replied to the aging Renoir, who
had recommended
stroking the backside of his nudes, "I do not like
two exceptions,
liked backsides.
in Cubist
is an experiment
exception
techniques,
where
the prominent
buttocks may signal Modi's
disenchantment
with Cubism. The second, in a bright, hard, smooth surface unusual
buttocks."
One
to the
in Modigliani,
in proportion
the buttocks
greatly exaggerates
slim and tapered upper torso in a clear allusion to Ingres' backward
George Sand referred to
glancing Grande Odalisque (1814). Novelist
"the back of a white bloodsucker,"
and
Ingres' nude as possessing
in
three to five extra lumbar vertebrae may figure somewhere
the genesis of Modi's
swanlike necks. Still, buttocks
for Modi may
also come to signify inversion, eros up-ended,
fantasy defeated or
failures that do
out, dreams gone awry, erotic nightmares,
wrong-side
her
not add up to a repudiation of eros so much as an exploration
of its
limits and discontents. Modigliani
does not pursue eros on its Sadean
lusts or unspeakable
acts, the blood
night journeys into deranged
sacrifices that obsess Bataille, the macabre erotics of "artist-gravedig
ger" (a term that some contemporaries
applied to Ingres). In nudes
as a series, however,
it seems inescapable
own
eros
as
its
disenchantment,
represent
dreaming
failures of being.
sporadic backsliding
conceived
168
that some will
its reversals,
its
Modi's
resist the dismemberment
of the human body typical
the techniques of Cubism?in
favor
art?including
of the body. Picasso claimed that
of an almost tender re-enchantment
a portrait should put the legs beside the body, which only reveals his
nudes
of much Modernist
erotic re-membering
from Modigliani's
(or un-forgetting).
in their mix of dream and reality, not only set him
nudes,
apart from other Modernist
painters but also suggest that Modernism
in art cannot so easily be recounted as a story of rebels and conserva
distance
Modi's
tives.
"We were
wrote William
Butler Yeats
the last Romantics,"
of poets. Yeats reflects the perspective
1931 about his generation
who did not
Modernists
in
of
repudiate the past but rather sought their
traditional "sanctity and loveliness." Modi
and his nudes
refused the Futurist agenda to blow up the museums,
into the era of Picasso
extend the tradition of Titian and Giorgioni
themes
in what
he called
for taking
and Foujita. Yeats praised his generation of last Romantics
their themes from the "book of the people." There is good reason
to the discomfort
of
enjoy Modigliani,
why so many museum-goers
critics who praise Modernism
high-brow
Modi's work, in its contempt of bourgeois
a commitment
expresses
ing numbness,
for its shock
restrictions
of the new.
and sleepwalk
archaic ways of
to ancient,
eros.
are
in
rooted
that
being
ultimately
the
like Yeats, Rilke, and Mahler,
among
belongs
Modigliani,
He makes no compromise
Modernists who are not proto-post-modern.
with commerce or bourgeois values. Surfaces interest him mainly as
they cover the unseen or forgotten, bodies interest him as a space of
being. He is among the more literary painters, although he wrote little
to his mother. His recitations, drunk or
beyond occasional postcards
but also Dante, Petrarch, and
sober, included not only Lautr?amont
His nudes may claim
Villon. He venerated Nietzsche
and D'Annunzio.
their least obvious
kinship, however, with the "great odes" of Keats,
from a remarkable creative burst (from 1818 to 1819)
similarly emerging
while the poet was dying of tuberculosis. Minus the "great odes" Keats
is a promising minor poet, and Romanticism minus Keats has lost its
"great odes" both redefine Keats and reshape Romantic
era of the great war and its immediate aftermath, the
In
the
poetry.
uncover a bittersweet Keatsian semantics of love
nudes of Modigliani
heart. The
and death
and permits us to reshape an
They challenge and reward our experi
of eros.
life-affirming electrifications
that redefines
his
lifework
of Modernism.
understanding
ence of the complex,
169