Meryle Secrest by Modigliani: A Life

Author:Modigliani: A Life
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Italy, Modigliani, Individual Artists, Architects, General, Painters, Photographers, Individual Artist, Amedeo, Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945), Artists, Biography & Autobiography, Art, History, Painters - Italy, Biography, European
ISBN: 9780307263681
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2011-03-01T06:00:00+00:00

Beatrice Hastings at the turn of the century (image credit 10.2)

In Minnie Pinnikin Modigliani has the name of Pâtredor, or Pinarius, and the first chapter is a description of their meeting. He was “fishing men from the street, swinging them with his long hands. ‘How beautiful he looks this morning!’ It was true he was really beautiful. The sun that danced in his hair leaned forward to look into his eyes.” Then Pâtredor becomes aware of Minnie Pinnikin and drops everything to run after her. “One could tell that they would be married one day, but no one ever mentioned it simply because it was not yet time,” she wrote. They were “still playing the first love games: jumping from hill to hill, traveling the world without stopping anywhere, drinking rivers of hope as big as the Seine.” All of which does not tell us how they met either.

The version that probably comes closest to the truth—which is not saying much—is the one published in the New Age early in June 1914. She had arrived in Paris two or three weeks before and they had already met, but he was probably looking disheveled. They met again at Rosalie’s one evening. A friend whom she does not identify except as “an English bourgeoise” “was satisfied when she saw me wake up from a sulk to be very glad with the bad garçon of a sculptor.” This is obviously Modigliani, though what she means by being awakened, a sulk, or even “to be very glad” is not explained. Her evanescent and coquettish literary style would give some of her columns such a maddening feeling of evasiveness that the wonder is that they were even published, much less read. She continued, “He [referring to Modigliani] has mislaid the last thread of that nutty rig he had recently, and is entirely back in cap, scarf, and corduroy. Rose-Bud was quite shook on the pale and ravishing villain.” Rose-Bud is Rosalie, and almost everyone in Hastings’s columns is disguised in such a way as to be understood by the “in” crowd. But then, she loved disguises, the more the merrier. Born Emily Alice Haigh, she soon became Beatrice Hastings. She wrote her column as Alice Morning and was, at various times, A.M.A., E.H., B.L.H., T.K.L., V.M., T.W., Beatrice Tina, Cyricus, S. Robert West, and on and on.

There was nothing elusive about Modigliani when he was in love. Hastings might couch her feelings in coy fantasies, rolling her eyes and fluttering her Oriental fan; he was all masculine impetuosity. If the stories can be believed, and at least one has the ring of truth to it, he might even make a brazen date with a woman he fancied as her husband or boyfriend sat listening in amazement and disbelief. In the years since Akhmatova, he had taken and dropped as many delectable mistresses as Hastings claimed lovers. But he must have done so with exemplary tact, to judge from the willingness of said ladies to tearfully press him with parting gifts instead of the other way around.

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