Bohemia Comes Undone: Amedeo Modigliani
By Harriet Zinnes
It is certainly about time that a New York City museum shows a retrospective of the popular Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. He died in Paris in 1920 at the age of thirty-five of tubercular meningitis, but he his passion is resurrected at the Jewish Museum (1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92 Street), where the exhibition will continue until September 19, 2004.
Is the artist’s popularity due to the myth that the title of the exhibition, "Modigliani: Beyond the Myth," makes reference to? That decadence is the supposedly typical Bohemian artist life — a life of hashish, hangovers, promiscuity, poverty, illness (and the suicide of his twenty-one-year -old pregnant lover, Jeanne Hebuterne, the day after his death) — all overcome with a dedication to art. _ But biographical narrative is not everything for the serious viewer. It is the work that gives the narrative its life. Famous for his paintings of voluptuous women (consider "Reclining Nude" of 1917), the artist, who encountered the persistent anti-Semitism of post-Dreyfus Paris, identified himself as "I am Modigliani, Jew." It is this emphasis, the artist’s awareness of his social and religious history that led to his concentration on portraiture. Modigliani used the subject of the caryatid, the female-gendered column of pilaster in architecture as an important symbol in his work. It is usually, therefore, the stationary head or more interestingly the full body in dynamic torsion. The turns of the head, the dramatic posturing, the almost invitational allure of body and head in the nude figures are characteristic.
Though Modigliani is considered the supreme example of the Circle of Montparnasse, the group of Jewish artists who immigrated to Paris shortly before World War I, "Modigliani: Beyond the Myth," reconsiders the artist’s particular social and religious history in relation to his singular preoccupation with portraiture as a cultural revelation.
