Notes From the Sick Room by Steve Finbow

Author:Steve Finbow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Notes From the Sick Room
ISBN: 9781910924433
Publisher: Repeater Books
Published: 2016-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

Already a smoker of hashish, Modigliani fell in with the artists living in Montmartre, including Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse. They used a building called Le Bateau-Lavoir, close to the banks of the Seine, as a meeting place and residency, along with writers such as Max Jacob (who gave the building its name), Guillaume Apollinaire and Alfred Jarry. A hotbed of discussion, drinking, drug-taking, creativity, poverty and disease, the Boat Wash-House was a squat, studio and school for Modigliani and others — it was also where he would begin his descent into poverty, alcoholism, violence and death.

For the first six months after arriving in Paris, Modigliani walked the streets of Montmartre dressed in the style of a bohemian artist, mixed with fellow painters, hired a studio, drank sensibly and appeared reserved and somewhat haughty. Still a mother’s boy, he found it hard to shed his family’s bourgeois background. When he had first rented his studio in nearby in Rue Caulaincourt, he had decorated the walls with prints from the Renaissance masters and Italian academic painters and furnished it with heavy drapes. After he had begun his descent into alcoholism and drug addiction, he ransacked the studio, tearing down the old prints and drapes and destroying his early works. Tuberculosis was affecting his work and his socializing; he camouflaged the effects of his disease by at first pretending he was an alcoholic and drug addict and then, because these substances — particularly absinthe and hashish — ameliorated the pain and gave him the confidence he needed to live a lie but also to continue his painting, drawing and sculpting, he became dependent on them in reality.

Modigliani not only destroyed his own paintings, he destroyed those of other artists, he stripped naked in public, and yet these excesses, this Saturnalia, stimulated his art and his Nietzschean ability to “create and piece together into one, what is now fragment and riddle and grisly accident.” His sketching and painting became as obsessive and excessive as his drinking and drug-taking, thousands of works were destroyed by him, or lost, or given away to models and girlfriends who lost or destroyed them.

He returned home to Livorno in 1909 for a brief stay because of his worsening illness and excessive lifestyle, but he was soon back in a new studio in Montmartre and there, in 1910, he met the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who became his lover and muse. Even though their relationship only lasted a year, Akhmatova’s long face, angular body, wan skin and deep-set eyes became the inspiration for Modigliani’s future portraits and nudes.

Modigliani’s poor health prevented him from joining the army at the outbreak of the First World War, but it didn’t prevent him having numerous affairs and lovers, one of whom, the bohemian artist, writer and Fitzrovian alcoholic Nina Hamnett (1890–1956), died after falling forty-feet from her apartment window. In December 1917, Modigliani had his first and only one-man show at the Berthe Weill Gallery in Paris, exhibiting the

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