Baptizing Modigliani the Jew

By MENACHEM WECKER

Modigliani: A Life
By Jeffrey Meyers
288 pages. Harcourt. $27.00.

Artist and writer Nina Hamnett—by no means a stranger to bohemian charades (she once danced naked on a café table just for “the hell of it”)—wrote of her first encounter with Modigliani: “Suddenly the door opened and in came a man with a roll of newspaper under his arm. He wore a black hat and a corduroy suit. He had curly black hair and brown eyes and was very good looking. He came straight up to me and said, pointing to his chest, ‘Je suis Modigliani, Juif, Jew,’ unrolled his newspaper, and produced some drawings. He said, ‘Cinq francs.’”

Thus unfolds one tale from the “Jews in Paris, 1913” section of Jeffrey Meyers’ new book, Modigliani: A Life. The quote highlights almost every tragic component of Modigliani’s life. A notorious Don Juan, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)—Modi to his friends—wore his Jewishness on his sleeve and was always looking for money to instantly squander on drink (absinthe was his favorite). In a very extensively researched biography, Meyers tracks several instances where Modi “went out of his way to emphasize his Jewish identity” even to Gentile peers. In one famous story, which Meyers believes is partly true, Modigliani “screamed ‘Je suis juif et je vous emmerde’ (I am a Jew and I shit on you)” to anti-Semitic Royalists whom he overheard discussing the Dreyfus affair. Terrified, the story goes, the Royalists fled as quickly as they could manage.

But Meyers joins historians like Erwin Goodenough, Paul Baur, and Kaufmann Kohler in denying the presence of “Jewish art.” Although he admits that living in anti-Semitic Paris “heightened [Modi’s] consciousness of being Italian and Jewish,” Meyers insists that Modi “was not a ‘Jewish’ painter,” even bizarrely suggesting that some works are “at worst, Jewish self-hatred.”

Modigliani could not have been a Jewish artist, to Meyers, because Judaism opposes art. “The eastern European Jewish artists came from an austere religion, rich in Hebrew text and theology, but which, like Islam, proscribed graven images. They created splendid decorative arts, but had almost no pictorial or sculptural tradition.” Meyers continues, “The Jewish artists who came to France… created more painting and sculpture in the twentieth century than all the painting and sculpture that Jews had produced since biblical times.”

Indeed twentieth century painters like the so-called Impressionists did dash off many paintings in plein-air, where the previous generations used a technique, glazing. But Meyers ignores a whole tradition of Jewish art, most prominently Dura Europos and Beit Alpha. Kalman Bland, in his introduction to The Artless Jew, puts it bluntly: “Medieval Jews indeed placed the visual arts on their compulsory philosophic agenda; they indeed railed against idolatry. But their travel itineraries, polemical literature, biblical commentaries, and law codes proved that they did not construe the Second Commandment to mean that all visual images were forbidden.”

Meyer’s Modi is an assimilated Jew, the “first Jewish artist, not simply of modern times, but of all time, to paint sensuous nudes, so that they cannot be called characteristically Jewish.” Several Jews seem to have painted the “not Jewish” nude before Modi, including Camille Pissarro (although his wife allegedly disapproved), Marc Chagall, and Max Liebermann. Whether Modigliani’s nudes—or Pissarro’s, Chagall’s, Liebermann’s, or anyone else’s for that matter—can be viewed as Jewish per se is certainly debatable. Art dealer Paul Guillaume once said that Modi “liked to think of himself and his art as Jewish.” (Meyers calls this “misleading.”)

Either way, Modi was certainly no scholar of Jewish law. Modi, who could rarely even afford running water in his rooms (he moved whenever rent was due), told his friends that “it was a Jewish practice, standing up, to wash oneself as completely as possible and that rinsing the mouth with cold water made one lucid.” Where he heard this is unclear. Perhaps he confused some laws pertaining to mikvah (Jewish ritual bath) in which bathers would presumably stand. His confusion about mouth-rinsing is entirely mysterious.

Born to Sephardic Jews in Livorno, Tuscany, Modigliani was always an Italian outsider, exiled in Paris. He died—probably of tubercular meningitis—in the Hospital de la Charite, gasping “Italia! Cara, cara Italia!” (Italy! Dear, dear Italy!) But try as he might, he could never stay away from Paris for long, even when his family members tried many times to keep him in the country away from alcohol during his many sick periods.

Meyers can not avoid Modi’s Jewish life. He associated with many Jewish artists: Chagall, Indenbaum, Kremegne, Nadelman, and Orloff. Chaim Soutine was a close friend. Further, Modi’s painting titles include “Aour” (perhaps from the Hebrew for light,), “Young Rabbi,” and “The Jewess.” But Meyers sees the recent Jewish Museum exhibit “Modigliani: Beyond the Myth” as imposing a Jewish identity on the unwilling artist. Meyers laments how Emily Braun’s essay in the Jewish Museum catalog “recycled some unconvincing clichés that could easily apply to many other artists” and “This catalogue overstates Modi’s artistic debt to Judaism.”

To be sure, defining “Jewish Art” requires a definition of the thorny term “Jewish.” Modigliani, who openly declared his Jewish identity and spread his misconceptions about Judaism, is no easier to address as a Jewish painter than Chagall. Where Chagall painted many crucifixions (he was an equal opportunity businessman), Modi painted long necks in the style of the Mannerist-depicted Madonnas. But perhaps Meyers could have grappled with Modi’s paintings as art, in which case he might have found them formally Jewish. The portraits often lack eyes (as if looking inwardly), they are alive and dynamic—even the sculptures are not Graven Images—and bluntly announce themselves as Modi declared his identity. Like the painter, the work stands when it washes itself and declares to naysayers, ‘Je suis juif et je vous emmerde.’