A.M.
Modigliani & the Artists of Montparnasse
Los Angeles County Museum
of Art
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The work is one of
inexhaustible variety and individuation, yet Cocteau felt it was incumbent on
him to justify its uniformity. Say rather its singularity. The armature of
Brancusi aerodynamics and African masks and kouroi sustains the portraiture of the faultless character sketch
and the draftsmanship of Holbein, all proceeding from the standpoint of
Cézanne and Seurat, with a very strong influence of Toulouse-Lautrec (the
café sketch artist early on, later the great painter and designer) and a
finished technique to be compared with anyone’s, which is seen deployed
to fullness in the nudes, where the ornamentation of the elemental sculptures
is replaced by his discovery of painting. Wrestling against stone
was an early preoccupation; these elongated heads make Giacometti inevitable.
Elie Nadelman around 1907 already had devised a semi-abstracted portrait
drawing in aerodynamic curves. That’s also when Matisse converted his Blue Nude into the bronze Reclining Nude I. Next, Modigliani planned
his stone caryatids, carven odalisques. In the midst of this, he painted the
Fauve-tinged Paul Alexandre in Front of
a Window and the Signac-applied Reverie
(Study for the Portrait of Frank Haviland). The Portrait of Chaim Soutine (1915) has completed his adaptation to
the last of his difficulties, and the Paul
Guillaume of the same year quite belies the informal, catch as catch can
descriptions of him given by all but the incomparable Max Jacob, who cites
Picasso as authority that Modigliani was “the only artist in Paris who
knew how to dress,” a fashion-setter in this regard. The Seated Servant, the Beatrice
Hastings in a Checkered Shirt and the Young
Girl (all of 1916) clarify the disvestment of superfluities and the
exploration of matters pertaining to the successful tools within his grasp.
The Jean Cocteau in a high-backed
chair allows itself to be visibly adjusted on the canvas. The Little Peasant of 1918 might be a
Cézanne. It’s hard to look at
the other works by De Chirico, Léger, Rousseau, Picasso, the Delaunays,
Lipchitz, Rivera, Soutine, Archipenko, etc., as they all discreetly play (for
this exhibition) the role of supers in Montparnasse only to give you an idea
of the times. Nonetheless, Jacob Epstein’s Portrait of Mrs. Epstein (1916) is a lively face, bangs and
earrings cast in bronze with scumbled eyes. Raymond Duchamp-Villon made of the
Professor Gossett who treated his war injuries a bronze mask of salvation. A
certain well-known minor Los Angeles art critic is represented, I can assure
you, to the life by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s 1912 bronze portrait head
(evidently derived from Géricault and Rodin), The Idiot. The portraits of
Modigliani have, after all, something in common, that smile to be found in a
certain painting at the Louvre. The Los Angeles Times
Art Critic Christopher Knight panned the show on the grounds that Modigliani
is an incompetent. The museum subsequently auctioned off several Modiglianis
in its possession. |
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