L 4 4-W af,%., ar St Modigliani exhibit, at the Jewish Museum in New York and coming to Toronto next month, casts new eye on the work of an early modernist. FRAN HELLER Special to the Jewish News I ITN 9/ 3 2004 48 talian Jewish sculptor and painter Amedeo Modigliani was only 35 when he died of tuber- culosis in Paris in 1920. His extreme poverty, chronic ill health and profligate lifestyle, including wine, women and drug addiction, fueled the myth surrounding his bohemian ways, which overshad- owed his art. The exhibit "Modigliani: Beyond the Myth", at the Jewish Museum in New York through Sept. 19, looks beyond the artist's life, focusing instead on his art in the broader context of his Sephardic Jewish roots and the prevailing social, political and cultural climate of his time. It moves to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from Oct. 23-Jan. 23, 2005, and then to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., from Feb. 28-May 29. Best known for his paintings of reclining nudes and portraits with elegantly elongated features, Modigliani's work is represented in the exhibit by more than 100 paintings, sculptures and drawings, culled from collections and museums worldwide, including Israel. They affirm his place in the pan- theon of early European modernism. Modigliani was born in Livorno, Italy, in 1884. The Modigliani family, Sephardic Jews, had left Rome for Livorno in Tuscany, a political and reli- gious haven, around the middle of the century. Unlike Rome and Venice, Livorno did not have a ghetto. Modigliani had an intellectual upbringing, mainly due to his mother, whose lineage traces back to the 17th century Dutch-born Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza and others contributed mightily to the secularization of Judaism and cultural assimilation. It was in this climate of universal tolerance and Judeo-Christian inclusiveness that Modigliani was raised and which infused his values and his art, said exhibit organizer Mason Klein, a curator in the fine arts department at the Jewish Museum. Modigliani, a sickly child, was stricken with pleurisy in 1895 and with tuberculosis — then an incurable disease — three years later. Two small and extremely rare extant works from childhood reveal the young artist's precocious maturity as well as his preoccupation with death. In the 1896 drawing Young Male Nude, created by Modigliani when he was 12, a young boy is pictured standing upright, while another lies supine below him. A space between the two figures, obscuring the legs of the standing figure, emphasizes the artist's uncertainty about life and death. Amadeo Modigliani in his studio, c. 1915 An early painting by Modigliani is The Jewess (La juive), dated 1908. The doleful mood of this femme fatale reflects Picasso's Blue Period, Picasso being an artist Modigliani both admired and envied. Modigliani ceased making sculpture in 1915 due to difficulties posed by World War I, the cost of stone and his failing health. The uni- versal language of geometry he applied to his sculptures was now wedded to portraiture. At first flush, all of Modigliani's portraits convey a palpable sameness in his subjects' mask-like, enigmatic gazes. Upon closer exami- nation, each portrait reveals a distinct individ- ual behind the persona. For example, Jean Cocteau perfectly conveys the elegant and aloof painter, writer and film Jeanne Hebuterne," 1919: Pregnant with their second chile4 critic who appears seated upright in a throne- Hebuterne committed suicide the day after Modigliani died. like chair. His angled face, pinched mouth and elongated cylindrical neck capture the snob- The lone tree and wending path in Small Tuscan bish character of the dandyish Cocteau, who sports Road, leading to a distant, hazy horizon, is an apt a bow tie and a hankie in his pocket. metaphor for a future cloaked in doubt. Portrait of Paul Guillaume (Nova Pilota) portrays Modigliani thought of himself principally as a the artist's parvenu art dealer with a cigarette in sculptor when he first came to Paris in 1906. hand. The cocky tilt of Guillaume's head, the stud- He met Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi ied nonchalance and foppish manner underscore in Paris in 1909 and produced a series of carved Modigliani's distrust of the man, according to the heads in a range of ancient historical and cultural wall-text. archetypes, including Greek, African and Egyptian, Modigliani often sketched his artist friends at giving them a modernist geometric idiom. These Montparnasse, the artists' "colony" of Paris. striking heads, with their elongated noses and veiled Drawings of Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Jacques eyes, foreshadowed the artist's stylized portraits. Lipchitz and Moise Kisling are included in the exhibit. Jeanne Hebuterne was a young art student who A Proud Jew met Modigliani in 1916-17 and became his lover. In Modigliani did not experience anti-Semitism until a 1919 portrait, titled Jeanne Hebuterne, the subject's he came to Paris. Unlike other Jewish emigre artists head is cocked to one side, with one index finger who were eager to assimilate, Modigliani did not resting squarely on her cheek, the other on her lap. hide his Jewishness, introducing himself as "Je suis She appears melancholy and remote. Pregnant with Modigliani, Juif" or "I am Modigliani, Jew." their second child, Hebuterne committed suicide the At the same time, he was not an observant Jew, day after Modigliani died. nor does his art give any hint of his Jewishness.