A recent survey by Artco (今藝術) magazine found that around 60 percent of the special exhibitions held in Taiwan over the last 25 years have focused on a handful of impressionist masters whom we can safely call the name brands of modern art. Picasso: Masterpieces From the Musee National Picasso, Paris, which recently opened at the National Museum of History in Taipei, is the local public’s sixth “introduction” to the Spanish artist, and a Monet exhibition tentatively planned for the Taipei Fine Arts Museum would be the third exhibition at that institution since 2009 to hang out a shingle for Impressionism’s revered founder.
Against all this impressionist overkill, Modigliani and His Circle at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts comes as a breath of fresh air. Finally, a real examination of history rather than just another crowd-pleaser.
The Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani was indeed an impressionist, but he was also an enigmatic
Photos courtesy of Modigliani Institut Archives Legales Paris-Rome
and controversial figure who lived recklessly and brought a primitive monumentalism to post-Impressionist abstraction.
He died in 1920 at the age of 35 from tuberculosis, though a cabinet full of bad habits — absinthe, brandy, hashish and possibly other drugs — likely contributed to his untimely death. He was handsome, a dandy and known to have fathered at least three illegitimate children as well as a daughter by his wife Jean Hebuturne, who, one day after his death and nine months pregnant with a second child, committed suicide by jumping out of the fifth-floor window of their Paris home. Mourners at Modigliani’s funeral included Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Chaim Soutine, Andre Derain, Jacques Lipchitz, Fernand Leger and a number of other artists and dealers, many of them figures in the crucible of high Modernism that would later become known as the School of Paris.
The eminent 20th-century critic Clement Greenberg declared Modigliani one of the “martyrs of bohemia,” and many art historians see him as a sort of blue dahlia of high modernism. At the same time, however, others have denounced him as a “caricaturist” and a “middling modernist and peacock.” He is still an artist who elicits strong reactions.
Photos courtesy of Modigliani Institut Archives Legales Paris-Rome
Only around 400 of Modigliani’s paintings, sculptures and finished drawings are presently known to exist, so there is a distinct rarity and sense of occasion on encountering his art. Last year, one of his 1917 paintings of a nude woman sold for US$68.9 million, while an early 1910s stone sculpture of a head sold for US$52.8 million. Contemporaneous works of similar quality can now be seen in Kaohsiung.
“I think it’s every art lover’s dream to get close to Modigliani,” says Beatrice Hsieh (謝佩霓), director of the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. “Without him, the line of portraiture is dead.” Francis Bacon and other late moderns “all refer to Modigliani,” says Hsieh, who curated the exhibition.
An art historian with a master’s degree from Belgium and a PhD from South Africa, Hsieh began working on Modigliani and His Circle shortly after taking the Kaohsiung museum’s directorship in late 2009 and was able to assemble 179 works through her personal connections in Europe.
At the core of the exhibition are around a dozen Modigliani boilerplate masterpieces, paintings and sculptures, which, because they are usually hanging in the homes of wealthy private collectors or cloistered away in art institutes, are infrequently exhibited, though their quality is comparable to the artist’s more famous works in the museums of Europe and the US.
Large Elongated Nude (Celine Howard) of 1918 is the largest Modigliani nude known to exist. Recalling a Cubist-inspired take on Manet’s Olympia, the eroticism of the painting was exceptional for the day — one year before it was painted, a show of similar paintings in what was to be Modigliani’s last ever solo exhibition was shut down in Paris on grounds of indecency. Like Olympia, Modigliani’s nude reclines luxuriously while looking back unabashedly at the viewer. But unlike Manet’s idealized whore, she does not cover her sex, she is a real person, and the gaze is more incidental than confrontational. We are not so much dared to look at her as privy to a more intimate sight. Perhaps it is a moment of post-coital languor, but even if it is not, the attitude of her pose is still charged and decadent.
Celine Howard and other oils on display also exhibit a pictorial flatness and simplification of form that approaches Matisse, but does not surpass him. Modigliani’s portraits from the late 1910s — there are four excellent examples hanging — exhibit the classic traits of “a Modigliani.” There is an S-line, or a sort of swaying curve, to the posture, and the women almost invariably have slender shoulders, vacant pupil-less eyes, classical Italian lips and skin painted in earthy, Gaugin-like oranges with sanguine flushes in the cheeks. Some criticize this as formulaic, though the same could be said of Picasso at that time. Stylistic formulas were ways of developing abstract ideas for painting, and in pushing beyond Cubism, Modigliani was very much in the mix.
There are not enough great works here to call this a Modigliani retrospective, and it does not try to be. Rather it is a story of the artist’s life, with context added by dozens of the artist’s own drawings, family photographs and works by other artists — “his circle.”
A Sephardic Jew from a merchant family in Livorno, Italy, Modigliani was the youngest of four children, one of whom, Giuseppe, was to become a leftist politician who would eventually oppose Mussolini.
Amedeo Modigliani began painting at the age of 14 under the tutorship of Guglielmo Micheli, a notable Italian impressionist, and his young life is shown in photos and his own early canvases as well as those of his master. He moved to Paris in 1906 at the age of 22, soaking up surrealist literature and quickly meeting Brancusi, one of the greatest modern sculptors. Following Brancusi’s lead, Modigliani threw himself into carving and casting busts, finally evolving a style of elongated, ovoid faces bearing the distinct influence of African masks and Easter Island megaliths. (Hsieh notes, with some merit, that one resembles a Buddha.)
With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Modigliani traded his chisel for a paintbrush. Most of his acknowledged masterpieces were painted in the three to four years before his death in 1920. A great deal of his archive remained out of sight in the care of his one surviving daughter, Jeanne, who was 2 years old at the time of her parents’ deaths and sorely embittered by the fact. With her death in 1984, a great quantity of sketches and other materials became public for the first time.
Modigliani’s Paris years are informed in this exhibition through a few canvases by others of the School of Paris, though generally not the best known. French painter Max Jacob and Polish painter Moise Kisling were among Modigliani’s close associates, and their works include some gems. Another room shows a number of less well-known painters — Elisee Maclet, Edmond Hueze, Maurice Georges Poncelet, Gen Paul, Tsuguhara Foujita — whose works largely fail to amaze. Brancusi, Leger and, yes, Picasso, would certainly have been better, though it is perhaps not fair to expect them. This exhibition’s achievements have already superseded its budget to an exceptional degree.
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