MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK. BEQUEST OF MRS. HARRIET H. JONAS

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK MRS. SIMON GUGGENHEIM FUND

from Modigliani’s early years in Paris, a time
when he concentrated on drawings and sculp-
ture. Modigliani himself gave many of the draw-
ings displayed here to his friend and first patron,
Dr. Paul Alexandre, who amassed a collection of
some 450 of the artist’s works. Several of those
drawings, included in the current exhibit, are
portraits of Alexandre, dark-haired and bearded
with a slightly curled mustache, dressed formally
but standing informally with his left hand dipped
into his pocket.
The range of Modigliani’s artistic influences
are also highlighted. Many drawings reimagine,
through a modern lens, the figures of the stately
sculpted ancient Greek caryatids that were used
as support columns in classical architecture.
Of particular interest is the fact that although
caryatid figures were traditionally female only,
Modigliani included male or gender ambiguous
figures — an indication that Modigliani looked at
gender in a more fluid way than usual for the era.
His numerous drawings of heads often have
the appearance of masks, in keeping with his
interest in non-Western art from Africa and Asia.
He also incorporated elements of Egyptian art,
seen to striking effect in his studies and drawings
of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, whom he
first met in 1910 and with whom he often went
to the Louvre to view its Egyptian collection.
By including artistic traditions from around the
world, Modigliani, says Klein, encompassed “global-
ism before the word existed.” •

LAURE DENIER COLLECTION, PAUL ALEXANDRE FAMILY, COURTESY OF RICHARD NATHANSON, LONDON

attitudes, batted about freely in various
newspapers and social circles, shocked
Modigliani, who had never experienced
this kind of bias in his Italian hometown of
Livorno, a port city that remained generally
free of restrictions and persecutions against
the Jews until the Fascist government of the
1930s.
In Klein’s view, Modigliani’s assertion
of his Judaism as a matter-of-course in
introducing himself reveals his pride in
his Jewish identity. For most people, Klein
says, Modigliani’s ethnicity was “invisible,”
as he neither looked nor sounded like the
derisive caricature of a hooked-nosed Jew
who spoke French with the accent of some-
one born in an Eastern European shtetl.
Instead, because his mother had been born
in Marseille, Modigliani spoke fluent French,
without a foreign accent. In addition, as a
Sephardic Jew whose generational roots
went back to Spain and Portugal, he resem-
bled someone from the Mediterranean, not
an “outsider” from beyond France’s borders.
“He could easily have passed as gentile but
he chose not to,” says Klein. “Rather than be
victimized or silent, he asserted himself as
a Jew.”
Equally telling of his commitment to his
Jewish heritage, Klein says, is the fact that the very
first painting he exhibited in Paris (and which will
appear in the Jewish Museum exhibit) was called La
Juive (The Jewess). The portrait, which Modigliani
painted in 1907-8, depicts a pale, dark-haired
woman with deep-set eyes, whose eyes and nose are
streaked with green. “There is an emphasis on both
the nose and the deep-set eyes, as if to emphasize

and question at the same time, what is ‘Jewish,’” he
says. Although anti-Semites were caricaturing Jews
as physically impure or deformed, he continues,
“Modigliani was saying … these [ features] are beauti-
ful.”
This is not the first time the Jewish Museum has
showcased Modigliani’s work. In 2004, it exhibited a
major retrospective, “Modigliani: Beyond the Myth.”
This time, the majority of the exhibit’s works derive

details

“Modigliani Unmasked” runs through Feb. 4, 2018, at the
Jewish Museum, New York. Thejewishmuseum.org.

jn

October 5 • 2017

43

