His first name means “beloved of God,” but Amedeo Modigliani’s life was less than blessed. Beautiful, charismatic, yet consumptive, he was the image of the tortured artist, burning through early 1900s Paris in a haze of hashish and alcohol. He palled around with Picasso and painted a succession of women, most of them nude. When he died at just 35, his eight-months’ pregnant lover leapt out of a window — killing their unborn child and orphaning their toddler daughter.
“Modigliani Unmasked,” an exhibit now on display at the Jewish Museum, shows a lesser-known side of him: that of a well-read and witty Italian Jew who braved anti-Semitism to live and work in Paris, the art capital of his day.
With his fluent French and Latin good looks, Modigliani could have easily passed for a gentile, says Mason Klein, the show’s curator. Instead, he defined himself as “other,” and worked that way, too, his drawings, paintings and sculptures looking like no one else’s. Yet the seeming simplicity of his nudes, with their elongated necks and sinewy figures, has lent themselves to forgeries: At a show of some 60 works in Italy this summer, police carted off 21 mock Modiglianis.
The real Modigliani was born in Livorno, Italy, in 1884. Always sickly, first with pleurisy, then typhoid and finally the tuberculosis that killed him, he was nevertheless a beauty. He had “the darkly attractive looks of the young Marcello Mastroianni,” biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes in “Modigliani: A Life.” That, and his charm and penchant for reciting poetry, made him “irresistible to women.”
A few years after his 1906 arrival in Paris, Modigliani hooked up with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, whose wide cheekbones and long, bumpy nose he captured in sculptures and nudes. After her came Beatrice Hastings, a bisexual British journalist. They had a stormy two years together before she left him, appalled by his disintegrating health and heavy drinking.
Many suspect the artist drank to suppress the hacking cough of TB, quaffing absinthe as if it were Robitussin. Alcohol made him rowdy. He’d strip naked at parties and even in the street.
But when he was working, he was sober, said Modigliani scholar and historian Kenneth Wayne, whose nonprofit Modigliani Project encourages scholarship to separate the real from the replicas and who interviewed one of Modigliani’s models, Paulette Jourdain, in 1992. “She was 15 when he painted her, and said he was very professional,” Wayne said of Jourdain. “He wouldn’t drink during sessions, just after.”
When Hastings left, Modigliani took up with delicate young Simone Thiroux, who bore him a son the artist never acknowledged as his own. (The boy, given up for adoption, became a priest.) Soon after, he met Jeanne Hébuterne, a 19-year-old art student. Blue-eyed and pigtailed, “she was basically pregnant for most of their time together,” Wayne said. Her parents, horrified that her beau was not only broke and alcoholic but Jewish, disowned her.
Not even Hébuterne’s love could save Modigliani, who, penniless, drew his last breath in a charity hospital. Two friends tried to make a death mask of his face but broke the mold; another artist salvaged it. For now, it’s at the Jewish Museum, under glass.
Less than two days after he died from tubercular meningitis, his lover killed herself, leaving behind their nearly 2-year-old daughter, also named Jeanne, whom Modigliani’s sister adopted. But that was all the artist’s family saw of his legacy: Every piece he hadn’t bartered for food, drink and rent belonged to art dealers, who sold them for slowly escalating prices. In 2015, one Modigliani nude fetched a record $170 million at Christie’s.
“The task of building up his legend I will leave to others,” wrote novelist Jean Cocteau — a close friend whose portrait Modigliani painted — three decades after the artist’s death. “I can speak only of the brotherly friendship shown to me by the simplest and noblest genius of that heroic age.”