The last Modigliani retrospective in Germany was a decade and a half ago, when it was a disaster. After a short time, the exhibition in the Bonn Art Museum had to be closed after 17 works turned out to be fakes. Anyone who tries again will feel this dark shadow and have to brace themselves.
The last Modigliani retrospective in Germany was a decade and a half ago, when it was a disaster. The exhibition in the Bonn Art Museum had to close again after 17 works turned out to be fakes. Anyone who tries again will feel this shadow and have to brace themselves.
The Potsdam Barberini Museum, together with the Stuttgart State Gallery, has taken on this challenge and dared to stage a retrospective with 56 portraits and nudes of Amedeo Modigliani. It not only provides security through the exclusive use of officially guaranteed works from the estate of direct collectors, but also a new look at this painter of elegiac nudes, who was previously often seen as a womanizer and drug-addicted bohemian.
Counterfeiters started immediately after Modigliani’s death
The pictures completed by other artists, which were in his studio without a signature after Modigliani’s premature death in 1920 at the age of just 35, opened up every opportunity for later forgers. André Salmon’s biography branded his former friend with an image that was valid until the end and can now be revised. The model seducer he rumored is now becoming a promoter of the self-confident, modern woman.
The Barberini scores another coup after the exhibition was previously shown in Stuttgart. Only four museums in Germany own works by the artist, who is one of the highlights of every international collection. Thanks to its excellent contacts, the Potsdam Private Museum has once again managed to create an exhibition that is not just an art experience, but also sets new scientific standards.
In portraits he gathered the Parisian scene around him
A picture of Modigliani is created that shows him in the midst of an incredibly inspiring scene of abstract, cubist, realist painters on Montparnasse in Paris, where the young man from Livorno moved in 1906 after studying in Florence and Venice. This cosmopolitan circle remains permanent in his portraits. In particular, his portraits created during the First World War seem like a reassurance of friendships with painters, collectors, dealers and writers.
They range from the portrait of the young painter Maud Abrantès, whose heavy eyelids and dark circles under her eyes reveal her to be a morphinist, to an abstract drawing by his collector and sponsor Paul Alexandre, who housed Modigliani in a demolished house on Montparnasse. In the sheet from 1913, Modigliani’s typical motif of one eye open and the other closed appears, which captures the view of the surrounding and inner world.
Modigliani’s portraits fascinate with their frontality and their close proximity to people. As with the painter friends Moise Kiessling or Juan Gris, the sides of the face can shift against each other and the eyes can be crooked. However, he does not become a follower of Picasso’s Cubism, but remains true to his own realism.
Although Modigliani does not belong to a particular style, he was still inspired. The exhibition also shows this through numerous works by other artists. The comparison becomes their most exciting part. When you look at his “Reclining Female Nude on White Pillows” from 1917, which pushes itself to the very front of the picture and looks steadily at the viewer, Paula Modersohn-Becker’s “Reclining Female Nude,” which was also published twelve years earlier, appears one wall away Paris emerged and radiates a similar autonomy in its directness.
Among the most astonishing neighborhoods is Modigliani’s “Sitting Woman” from 1918/19, an Italian woman he painted during his stay in Nice, alongside Gustav Klimt’s portrait “Johanna Staude,” which was painted around the same time. A new coolness has found its way into the artist’s pictures, who retreated to the Mediterranean before the war. Both images impress with their directness and the melancholic severity of the women, which is softened by the bright orange background.
He portrayed his lover twenty times
Unlike Modigliani’s Italian woman’s black dress, Johanna Staude’s wildly patterned top has a life of its own and appears much more vibrant. A dullness communicates itself. The following year the artist returned to Paris, where he died in January 1920, seriously ill with tuberculosis.
The artist legend emerged immediately, and a short time later his fiancée Jeanne Hébuterne, who was heavily pregnant with their second child, committed suicide. She had portrayed Modigliani over twenty times. One of the last ones of her hangs in the Barberini, with her typically elongated limbs and the narrow face, which she shows with a yellow sweater over her already bulging stomach.
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Portraits and nudes Modigliani’s are on view, along with 33 works by other artists
Modigliani’s perception has always included his specific view of women. His only exhibition at the gallery owner Berthe Weill in Paris, exclusively featuring nudes, was closed after just a few days after the police at the station opposite were alerted to a crowd of people in front of the gallery’s window.
His first exhibition became a scandal
According to the report, the display of pubic hair caused a stir. Barberini director Ortrud Westheider doubts this and rather suspects that the offensive nudity was disturbing as a form of female self-empowerment. The model that caused the scandal could have been Kiki de Montparnasse with the dark bobbed hair. The type of woman was not welcome. One of the treasures of the Potsdam retrospective is the catalog that belonged to Guillaume Apollinaire.
© akg-images / Erich Lessing
And another discovery was made during the research: an exchange of letters with the Berlin painter Ludwig Meidner. The two knew each other from Paris, and Modigliani’s part of the correspondence has now appeared in the Darmstadt city archives: a card and a letter from August and September 1907.
In it he writes to “Mon cher Meidner” on Schillerstrasse in Charlottenburg and asks him to sell the drawings he gave him. In his memoirs, Meidner characterized him as a sophisticated and sophisticated man who quoted Petrarch fluently. It is not known whether the sales worked. The time in Berlin was still too early for Modigliani. Herwarth Walden had contracted the Futurists in his Sturm gallery; there was no room for another Italian artist who was much gentler and stuck to nude paintings.
Modigliani’s women wear shirts and ties
Modigliani would have fit well into the city, as the excursus in a display case shows. Inside, three sketch pads from the years 1910-14 by Jeanne Mammen from the city museum are opened, on which he also painted the type of the garcon woman can be seen with the characteristic short haircut. Gender fluidity already existed back then, much earlier than the roaring 1920s, as is commonly assumed. Modigliani created an entire gallery of this figure, to which the exhibition dedicates a large separate room.
The large number of these portraits alone powerfully supports the exhibition organizers’ argument that the painter particularly wanted to support free-spirited women. With a bob they wear striped blouses with a tie or, in the style of children’s fashion, sailor shirts to emphasize the masculine look or to distance themselves from the role of mother.
© Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images
One of the most beautiful representatives is the painter Renée Gros, who married Moise Kisling and modeled for Modigliani’s “Girl with a Striped Blouse” in 1917. A photo shows her two years earlier with her future husband. Both wear the same short bangs, which are fashionable again today. Another discovery is the painter Èmilie Charmy. She created a self-portrait à la Garconne and several nudes that also presented themselves self-confidently.
However, the sculptor Modigliani only appears in passing with drawings that prepared his sculptures. Here too you can see how he breaks down gender constraints. For his planned “Temple of Beauty” he sketched caryatids, the female supporting figures of Greek art, but in a male pose with their arms raised above their heads and not at their sides. Appropriately, he called them “pillars of tenderness.”
There is another surprise: his painted “Caryatid” from 1911/12 with dark brown flesh looks like the sister of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck that is not far away. Suddenly the former loner, who couldn’t really be classified, appears as an artistic European who has a surprising amount in common with Picasso, Rodin, Schiele and the Brücke painters.