International Jaybird, 1966 (C) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Format: epub

Photographers today strive for “the Modigliani effect”, heads of his friends and associates and prominent dignitaries, and later on portraits in the nude, that Amadeo Modigliani was to come into his own. Tt was with a furious and almost frightening enthusiasm that the young artist threw himself into the night-world of Paris, spending his nights in drinking, in brawling, in experimenting with absinthe and at last with hashish (a cake made from cannabis indica, with basically the same formula as marijuana but far more deadly). He was a “wild youth.” In spite of the almost immediate acceptance of his work by the critics, and the acquiring of a loyal patron (Dr. Paul Alexandre, who still has one of the finest collections of Modigliani paintings in the world) the young artist was always broke, almost in trouble, and almost always in love. It was as if somehow he knew that his time would be short, and that he must live up a whole lifetime in weeks and months, Yet he was artist first and foremost, as French critic Claude Roy says, in his text for the splendid Skira “Taste of Our Time” — an art-book series featuring Modigliani: “Let us imagine a biographer who, wishing to trace the career of Modigliani, had only his works to go on: who had to infer the artist’s life story solely from internal evidence supplied by paintings, sculptures and drawings; who knew nothing whatever of the facts; and who had to deduce the course of Modigliani’s life from its successive fruits and nothing else. “For example, on studying the very earliest pictures he would discover in them French, distinctively Parisian influences. Not knowing the young artist’s nationality and birthplace, he would naturally assume that Modigliani was a native of the Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec and Cezanne, when the recent revelation of African statuary and the first Fauvre and Cubist pictures were providing younger, forward-looking artists with new, wildly-exciting models and stimulating them to orgies of originality ... “Then he would watch the painter gradually acquiring _ self-control, finding himself, working out a personal style and attaining a harmony, a spacious peace, of which there had been no promise in the extravagances of his hectic youth. Thus our detached observer could easily convince himself that, as time went by, Amadeo Modigliani settled down to an ever calmer, more contemplative way of life; that the leaping fires of early youth had burnt themselves out and given place to a tranquil radiance. After a stormy debut, he had effected, stage by stage, a gradual reconciliation with the creative turmoils of his personality, with other men, and with the entire scheme of things . . .” As we know, the converse was true. While the last years of the painter’s life were marked in , his work by a sort of lofty and loving contemplation, he attained nothing of this in his private life, either in his relationships with his mistresses, his associates, or his patrons. And he was determined

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