modigliani: humanizing the dream within the dream

Its an old question. Its manifestations are like sparks and fleeting, ambiguous forms capable of de-materialization. How do you reconcile the opposites between the sensual and the spiritual? Is defiance and disorder, as Modigliani seemed to imply, the only route to transport the creativity needed to solve the enigma and to achieve a new equilibrium of feeling without denying the extremes of its intensity.

His limestone heads are very revealing. They show a determination to save the sexual sinner from herself. A transcendentalized appearance suggests she inhabits another world, or at least an other-worldly state of mind. It all signifies Modigliani’s own contradictory attitude to women as seen in the contrast between canvases of reclining nudes and spiritualized heads. A duality, a love hate relationship taken up in the literary sense by D.H. Lawrence. The impulsive profane and the sacred; the exhibitionist primal animal body balanced against all soul and delicate interiority.

---Holland Cotter:With his milky skin and sleepy eyes, Amedeo Modigliani was one of modern art’s fabled beauties. His life was box-office gold, a classic mortal tale of squalor and salvation. An artist-genius sinks under the weight of poverty, illness and addiction, dies at 35, leaving behind ruined lives — his distraught mistress kills herself and their unborn child — and a body of hugely popular art. ...Is the story true? Only up to a point,...Unsurprisingly, he viewed artists as privileged beings. At 17, he wrote that as a species they had “different rights, different values than do normal, ordinary people because we have different needs which put us — it has to be said and you must believe it — above their moral standards.” Many adolescents play with such ideas. Modigliani went on to live them. Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-modigliani-by-meryle-secrest.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1308741239-b5VgZ0OPCke0ByLM1pQvDA image:https://echostains.wordpress.com/2010/06/page/2/

Art had already passed through a period where the exchange between madness and reason had modified its language, and in a radical manner. So called insanity in this age of reason, by seen as a byproduct of scientific rationalism and artistically an expression of the doom of yielding to instinct or encountering a goddess with a saving grace of a serious mind. Modigliani is tracing this world of Sade and Goya where man is cast into a darkness without origin, without limit and without nature; an ambiguity of chaos and the apocalypse in a void filled with the nothingness of unreason. Goya’s Nude Maja is becoming a Death and the Maiden story here, the transition between refinement and bestiality is blurring.

---Modigliani painted a series about thirty nudes in either sitting or reclining pose. “Reclining Nude – 3” is one among that series of nude paintings. The figure’s gaze is cast directly at the viewer, as the artist has framed the model as an object of possession and desire. Unlike Modigliani’s vast repertory of portraits of friends and lovers, the nude generally depicts unknown model. Modigliani’s nude in this painting looks charming. Modigliani’s nude is to raw sexuality, what Rousseau’s palm-court jungles were to nature, red in tooth and claw. In Paris, Modigliani could find the exquisite mixture of the very new art forms such as Cubism and sculpture of Constantin Brancusi, the old and sanctified like the Louvre and the colonial exotic like the collections of African and Cambodian arts. In Modigliani’s art, these influences were layered on top of his inherited Italian culture, the graceful sway-backed drawing of Botticelli and the nudes of Titan and Giorgione. Thus Modigliani’s work was a languid, tremendously attractive amalgam of old and new.--- Read More:http://www.famous-painters.org/Amedeo-Modigliani/Reclining-Nude3.shtm

 

The question is whether painting is an empty substitute for Modigliani compared to the flesh and blood experiences for which they were substituting. Coming from a Judaic heritage, he was less perplexed by a fixation on the sometimes nauseating history of a crucifixion of the body for a glorification of the spirit; the famous guilt complex where the elevation of ideas is achieved at the expense of felt experience resulting in a terror of the procreative being. Portraiture had hidden the body under layers of clothing, and the romantic tradition and expressionists avoided the issue by leaving it out of the picture in favor of harmonics of light and shade.

---The Nude Maja (La Maja Desnuda), by francisco de Goya celebrates the sexiest skin, the most resilient flesh, the most exquisite suggestion of a line of hair running from the navel down. But the incoherent articulation - the inexplicable incompetence of the drawing of the arms, the impossible position of the breasts, the unconvincing conjunction of the head with the neck - is a virtual denial of the Renaissance tradition's feeling for the body as a functioning whole, not an assemblage of delicious parts. Goya sees his nude as he sees the women in his portraits - as a doll.--- Read More:http://www.artandculture.com/media/show?media_id=61175&media_type=image

Holland: Sometimes it came in sustained relationships with women like the British journalist and poet Beatrice Hastings. Hastings, under the name Alice Morning, wrote a running account of the Parisian art scene for an avant-garde journal called The New Age. She had a caregiver’s temperament (she collected stray animals and nursed wounded wasps back to health) and money she didn’t mind sharing, and she liked to get high. She was everything he needed. …as in her description of the louche goings-on at the home of the art collector Paul Alexandre. Alexandre, a wealthy physician drawn to the romance of the low-rent life, leased a crumbling 12-room mansion, scheduled for demolition by the city, and turned it into an emergency studio and living space for artists. He also lived on the premises, and Modigliani was one of many who came to dine at his table, crash on his floor and participate in boisterous parties and “pagan dances” fueled by drugs, many supplied by Alexandre ­himself. Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-modigliani-by-meryle-secrest.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1308741239-b5VgZ0OPCke0ByLM1pQvDA aa

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---Amedeo Modigliani Portrait of Paul Guillaume (Novo Pilota) 1915 Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris --- Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit7-27-9.asp

Modigliani’s voluptuous nudes stare at the spectator seductively, promising,  embodying a guiltless pleasure guiltless pleasure, in contrast to the usually closed eyes of the sculpted heads, suggesting that they are meditating on higher things than their bodies. Indeed, they have none, as though they have risen above and discarded them, unlike the full-bodied odalisques, who are  proud of their flesh, displayed in the full bloom of youth. The odalisques and the heads epitomize the core conflict of Modiglianis art and life. But this conflict, tormented as it may have been, is marked by an absence of rage, a burbling anger that would confirm an inherent negativity of the spiritual being, thereby avoiding the path of least resistance towards symbolizing this negativity through a dehumanization of form.

Donald Kuspit:Modigliani was indeed a peintre maudit (like his friends Kisling and Chaim Soutine), but the people he portrayed are also subtly cursed by suffering, whatever their social prominence. It is Modiglianis ability to bring out the all too human in the pompously human — for example, in the Paul Guillaume of the 1915 Novo Pilota portrait — that makes his figures emotionally seductive, empathically attaching us to them the way Modigliani seems to have been. For Modigliani, paint is the empathic matrix in which the suffering figure exists, even as its schematic form gives it a spiritual aura that seems to reconcile it to its suffering, or at least works like a charm against the curse of suffering that contaminates life. Stoically self-contained, Modiglianis figures seem to have mastered tragedy, however tragic they look. …

---Amedeo Modigliani 1884-1920 Blue Eyes (Portrait of Madame Jeanne Hébuterne), 1917 oil on canvas 54.6 x 42.9 cm © 2004 Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White Collection, 1967 ---- Read More:http://www.ago.net/modigliani

…I am arguing that Modigliani rehumanized what Picasso dehumanized, as Jos Ortega y Gasset famously argued. Or rather Modigliani refused to dehumanize the figure in the name of form, that is, to achieve a formal rigor that seems superior to the informal figure and more artistically authentic by reason of its supposed autonomy. For Modigliani form was a way of bringing out and accenting inner human qualities, rather than some intriguing pure thing in itself. Austerity of form was a betrayal of the feeling of being human — and the feelings human beings had — for Modigliani. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit7-27-04.asp

Modigliani by Jeanne Hebuterne. Linda Lappin:we discover that Jeanne and Modi often painted the same subjects – ie – when someone came to sit for a portrait, Jeanne and Modi would sometimes both work at the same time in the studio – so that we have a second perspective on some of Modigliani’s portraits. These doubles – ie portraits of the same people painted by both Modi and Jeanne, allow us to grasp Jeanne’s independent research as a painter and appreciate her unique sensibility. She was particularly sensitive to background, décor, fashion --the very things Modigliani left out of his portraits -- and includes details of this nature in her work. Read More:http://awriterslifeinrome.blogspot.com/2010/10/update-on-jeanne-hebuterne.html image:http://mermaidsdrown.blogspot.com/2011/02/modiglianis-muse-jeanne-hebuterne.html

Holland Cotter: Secrest suggests that Modigliani, terrified of the social ostracism that would result if he were known to have the highly contagious disease, deliberately fostered a reputation as an alcoholic and addict to prevent detection. This cover allowed him to freely drink the wine that soothed his coughing, use the drugs that gave him energy to work — his output of paintings surged in his last years — and pass off as drunk and disorderly any irritable or violent outbursts.

.. What she clearly hopes to do, though, is replace the popular myth of the crash-and-burn genius who created art despite himself with the image of an artist who perceived his fate and took calculated steps to prolong and protect his life. The degree to which this revised image is valid remains a question. Whatever gloss one puts on the facts, the artist’s chemical dependence seems undeniable, … But the very idea of someone keeping quiet about a lethal and contagious disease raises serious ethical issues. Did he ever warn his friends, and his countless lovers, about their risk of infection from him? We have no evidence one way or the other. Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-modigliani-by-meryle-secrest.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1308741239-b5VgZ0OPCke0ByLM1pQvDA

Kuspit:This fusion of traditional humanism and modernist formalism is their innovation, one perhaps more important than purely formalist innovation, for it showed that pure forms have human relevance. Indeed, in their different ways Modigliani and Soutine successfully adapted modernist means to the expression of archetypal feelings, explicitly showing, as the Old Masters never did, that feelings are rooted in instinct even as they make one conscious of oneself -- a service to consciousness and selfhood that is spiritual in import. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit7-27-04.asp

The comparison with the consumptive Kafka are inevitable. Both are bound up in memory, and dreams of a dream. Kafka wandered into the outrageous, the transformative process of anger creating  a waking nightmare that we all share,laments for humanity’s proper inhumanity; a  mourning of a world of justice and reason that it nevertheless knows existed in mind but never in time. Modigliani remains attached to a spiritual consciousness in fact brings with it a sense of the oneness or unity of self that the instinctive never affords; a fine line between the spiritual and the instinctive, ultimately a cherishing of the human figure while Kafka appears contemptuous of it, or, implies that the forces of materiality have rendered it puppet like, and like Picasso, there is a distortion that dulls and de-natures the innate appeal. The position is equally valid, though both Kafka and Picasso were capable of the put-on, imposing Poe and Melville on which to slice rationalism.

Kafka: Were there arguments in his favor that had
been overlooked? Of course there must be. Logic is doubtless
unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living.
Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court,
to which he had never penetrated? He raised his hands and spread out
all his fingers….

… “Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that
name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.”…  “The hunting dogs are playing in the courtyard, but the hare will not escape them, no matter how fast it may be flying already through the woods.”

ADDENDUM:

Cotter:But even his art is slippery. It’s modernist and backward-looking, rigorous and sentimental, often bland but with a distinctive, instantly recognizable, easily imitated look. Within his lifetime, fake Mo­diglianis began appearing, and have flooded the market since. There’s no consensus about historical status. Secrest holds his work in higher esteem than I do. Is it ­really true that “Modigliani’s self-­imposed challenge, to see how far he could venture into abstraction without ending in either anonymity or caricature, must be one of the most difficult any artist since the Renaissance has attempted”? I would not credit him with such innovation. When, toward the end of his career, he saw new work by Picasso and Braque and lamented, “I am 10 years behind them,” he was absolutely right. Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-modigliani-by-meryle-secrest.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1308741239-b5VgZ0OPCke0ByLM1pQvDA