Marek Szwarc écrit sur Modigliani

 Monographs on Jewish Artists, 1927

by Marek SZWARC

on Amedeo Modigliani

Born in Livorno (Italy) in 1885. In 1905 he moves to Paris. Died in 1920, in the hospital La Charité in Paris. His pictures are in the collections of: Dr. Barnes, Philadelphia, Bang, Paris, Paul Guillaume, Paris, Zamaron, Paris, Tzank, Paris,Zborovski, Paris, Carcot, Paris, Dr. Devren, Paris, Dr. Saburo, Paris

Essays on Modigliani have been written by: Carcot, Felz, Waldemar George, Paul Guillaume, André Salmon, Varna. In Yiddish, the London journal “Renaissance” 

Reproductions of his pictures have been published by the Publishing House l'Art a Paris.

Modigliani is the first strong Jewish word in the arena of modern art. What characterizes his work is the spirituality that permeates its form. People speak of beautiful form, of pure form, of abounding form, and of simplified form. In Modigliani's case we must speak of spiritual form.

Modigliani’s nature is complicated, as is the nature of the modern Jewish intelligentsia. In him slumber atavisms that give to his European nature, to his Latin nature, a grace all of its own.

His conscious self is Italian. The rich Italian tradition reposes in him. This finds its expression in his urge to playfulness.  The play of line and of colour. He is decorative. His sense of giving new form to things is a result of his material approach to life. He would always seek out sense in form in order to render the form warmer, fuller of expression, he would press and squeeze and draw out the form until it deformed itself to such a degree that form gave birth to expression.

He is a child of Paris with his own imprint thanks to his concreteness. His sculptural instinct led him in the same direction. So he appears to be after all a committed cosmopolitan – only from the depth of his subconscious—the creation-factor of all artists—the Jew breaks through.

Through “formal” inclinations appears a mystical nature. It longs for the absolute. It wants to be complete, positive and unitary. As a cantor in the synagogue sometimes snatches at musical motifs from the outside and adapts them to his trite melodies and they become in him so Jewish-like…

As the Jewish masters of the plastic arts relied at times on models from the outside world and in the process of imitating such models created pure Jewish motifs –

So too the European, modern Modigliani, concerned with the External and the International, extracted from within himself an inner charm that led in the end to immortal works of a national value.

It sounds paradoxical to want to look for national values where the conscious inclinations are cosmopolitan. But it is sufficient to contemplate his work to find in his life a defense of a thought we already embrace. All his longings and yearnings and inclinations, unintelligible only to himself, created the conflict which we will attempt to illustrate here.

Amedeo Modigliani came from a wealthy Jewish Italian family. Came to Paris – estranged from Judaism. After having discovered African plastic arts, he submitted himself to its forms. Searching for ‘himself’ leads him through colourful dreams in which the sculpture, however, finds no rest. His vibrant spirit exploits the colour of the material property of the canvas, which in contrast to the property of stone seemed possessed of a brighter light. He becomes a painter.

Really, as if he senses his impending end he brooks no delay in expressing himself. He paints in a state of intoxication. He lives as a deluded man, slaking his thirst with alcohol and narcotics. His entire life is nothing but a delusion.

Unacknowledged. Blind to the fierce love of his cold-blooded wife and female friend, he flees drunk in the noisy Parisian boulevards. Running headlong, his hair dishevelled, his eyes burning – he stands in front of the Rotonde and declaims, to the mockery of the bystanders. Dante’s “Inferno”.

At the crack of dawn, waking from a fitful sleep, he performs negel-vasser, ablution. He is torn apart by his stubborn, atavistic Jewish instinct, which brings him to scream to all his good friends: No! I am not an Italian – I am a Jew…

He died in the hospital La Charité. His funeral was the first sign of his later recognition. The greatest Parisian artists, those who knew him and those who heard about him but never wanted to know – now showed up.

Soon after his death his wife took her life, being unable to endure the light of day – when “he” wasn't in the world anymore. Soon after his death, Modigliani’s name was on everybody’s lips. People mentioned his name in all the newspapers, wrote articles about him. They tore his paintings away from each others hands.

« Friends of the arts » stuffed their vulgar purses with money, buying and selling his paintings…Now he is hanging reverentially in the art galleries alongside the greatest masters of our time, and when people display his paintings on the wall, they pronounce his name with the respect proper to the market-price.

Essentially, what strikes the eye in his work is the line. Not only in his drawings, which are anyway linear, but even in his paintings Modigliani is graphic.

By graphic, we do not mean the dry, the black-white, the sharp – only the expressed, the precise. The contours disclosed to Modigliani the secrets of all subtleties and tenderness. He removed from the lines all possibilities, even his colour we can call graphic. Through his colour a spirit speaks. A spirit that speaks!

Does this sound spiritual, theosophical? This is not our point.

When we speak of spirit, we want to distinguish in the arts the opposite of pseudo-classicism that used to have to do inevitably with the exceptional. We have often misunderstood the classics, ascribing to them a coldness and lack of spirituality. It is sufficient to be familiar with Plato’s thoughts about beauty, in order to find even in Greek art the foregrounding of the spirit. In Plato’s dialogues it is said that the good is as a matter of course beautiful. But our pseudo-classics say the opposite, that the beautiful is always good. This is a big difference. For the Greek artist the object in itself was the aim of the creator. In this lies probably a bit of their idolatrous Weltanschauung. The “being” is the time.

But in Modigliani the object was abstract. The form was borrowed. It did not exist completely. It was only a pretext for an expression. In this sense the spirit speaks in all oriental art-works. Oriental art is, I would say, musical in its character.

Its colour and line speak to our subconscious.

It captivates us. Modigliani’s work is not complete yet. His life has been abruptly cut short. Surely we say that he himself introduced a new way. Modigliani is interesting for us as the type of personality that affected a circle of men in its time. Taking into consideration the span of time in which he worked, he understood how to subdue life.

Exactly as Matisse fashioned Parisian taste by his colours, so we witness today, almost ten  years after his death, how Modigliani’s line has captivated Paris.

Every magazine of fashion, every mannequin in department stores recalls Modigliani’s style. With one word we can say that in Paris people dress “a la Modigliani”.

It is not a small thing to be able to say about an artist that he subdued life. This fact alone is already a measure of his strength and value.

Now we will try to analyse the elements that we will call Jewish. We do not see the Jewish (elements) in the motifs the artist uses. The motif is sometimes a mask behind which the artist conceals himself.

The pseudo-classic motifs, for example, of which the 19th century knows no end, have never proved that the epoch is a classic one. The absence of spirituality and the drunkenness snuck out from every corner. We see the petit bourgeoisie-atheist, the socialist-bourgeois, the Bolshevistic-capitalist – all that reigns in our time. In the revolution there is a pathos that seizes upon fervent prophetic words. Modigliani’s line takes hold of us and we live with it. We are borne away with it. We suddenly lose ground and find ourselves in the world of ideas. We are created in God's image and this resemblance discloses itself in a form. The artist confines the form, and the “resemblance” starts to speak…

We, Polish-Russian Jews, stay on the side and marvel.

We are Slavs. 

We adhere to the earth as peasants.

We go dressed in long black frocks and small round hats.

We sport long peyes and wide dishevelled beards.

We are large-boned and hoarse, we are Slavs, and to us the Italian-cultural is foreign. But we are Jews. In us the old rich culture slumbers. Therefore are we attracted to Modigliani’s line and we rejoice.

Whether we like it or not we are Jews. Whether we like it or not we are Jewish artists. That Modigliani dreamt of Judaism like a groom dreams of his bride is unimportant, and even if he would not have been Jewish – he would have remained Jewish since he was their artist.We are numerous Pleiades of artists, who narrowly grow together with the Jewish masses; are they therefore more Jewish? We must rejoice for each free artist among us.

Free artists! Exactly as if the artist could be free – he is only an obedient slave of his inner vision.

Lieberman, Pissarro, Pascin, Chagall, Lifshitz and Kiesling, they are all Jewish artists and create Jewish art.

 

They are Jews as much as they are artists.

Therefore we rightly include Modigliani as a representative of modern Jewish art.

Marek Szwarc

Paris, May 22, 1927.