{"id":4359,"date":"2017-10-02T09:57:02","date_gmt":"2017-10-02T07:57:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moked.it\/international\/?p=4359"},"modified":"2017-10-02T09:57:02","modified_gmt":"2017-10-02T07:57:02","slug":"italics-modigliani-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moked.it\/international\/2017\/10\/02\/italics-modigliani-new-york\/","title":{"rendered":"ITALICS Modigliani in New York"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"italics\"<\/a>By Talya Zax*<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the first room of the Jewish Museum\u2019s new exhibit \u201cModigliani Unmasked,\u201d a case displays two issues of La Libre Parole, the early-20th century French anti-Semitic newspaper founded by \u00c9douard Drumont.<\/p>\n

The covers of both feature caricatures of Jewish men, their features overblown and bulbous.<\/p>\n

Hung on a nearby wall is Modigliani\u2019s 1908 painting \u201cThe Jewess,\u201d a study in jewel-toned oil paints. The subject is, most probably, Modigliani\u2019s mistress Maude Abrant\u00e8s, a married American Jew whose visage appears in several of the exhibit\u2019s drawings. She appears statuesque and guarded. Her face is slender, her features angular, her bearing aristocratic.<\/p>\n

The ability to compare these two images \u2014 Drumont\u2019s Jew and Modigliani\u2019s \u201cJewess\u201d \u2014 is one of the pleasures of the exhibit which features artwork primarily from the collection of Dr. Paul Alexandre, an early friend of Modigliani in Paris, who was also his first and most dedicated patron. Alexandre preserved over 400 of his friend\u2019s drawings from the period between 1906 and 1914 \u2013 a trove that wasn\u2019t publicly revealed until 1993, when Alexandre\u2019s son No\u00ebl published reproductions of the work in a book.<\/p>\n

Amedeo Modigliani, the painter and sculptor who died of tuberculosis in 1920 at the age of 35, has had a number of afterlives. His early death, followed by the tragic suicide of his fianc\u00e9e Jeanne H\u00e9buterne, then pregnant with their second daughter, has made him a subject of morbid romantic fascination. His art has become some of the most highly valued in the world; in 2015 one of his paintings fetched $170.4 million at a Christie\u2019s auction, then the second-highest price paid for an artwork in such a venue.<\/p>\n

But as the exhibit protests, occasionally clumsily, in the popular eye, Modigliani\u2019s Jewishness has traditionally been considered less pertinent.<\/p>\n

Born to a Sephardic family in the Tuscan town of Livorno in 1884, Modigliani moved to Venice in 1901, seeking a cosmopolitan artistic haven. Having heard that Paris better suited the bill, Modigliani migrated there in 1906. That same year, the Dreyfus affair, a scandal over the contested 1894 treason conviction of the Jewish French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, resolved in an official recognition of its subject\u2019s innocence. While he had been exonerated, the wave of anti-Semitic sentiment and violence that the conflict over his conviction had provoked continued to affect Parisian society.<\/p>\n

Modigliani, according to those who knew him, spoke fluent French and bore few of the physical markers that would have led others to suspect his Jewishness. Had he not taken to introducing himself by saying \u201cje suis Juif\u201d \u2013 \u201cI am a Jew\u201d \u2013 he would likely have come off as just another bohemian artist.<\/p>\n

His artwork, of course, prohibited that outcome; not every artistic-minded denizen of a fin-de-si\u00e8cle Parisian garret made work that, a century after their deaths, sells for seven figures. But in light of his status, however masked, as being somehow outside Parisian society, the artistic characteristics for which he became known \u2014 elongated, precise, mask-like faces, stylized painted nudes, the pronounced influence of non-Western art forms \u2014 can be seen as signals of a radical rejection of his society\u2019s understanding of race.<\/p>\n

So, at least, argues \u201cModigliani Unmasked,\u201d while also positing that its subject, unusually for his time, employed foreign influences respectfully.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile his peers were also appropriating ancient or non-Western art, he alone \u2014 with the possible exception of Elie Nadelman, the Polish-born sculptor \u2014 sought to directly challenge the assumption of European cultural superiority,\u201d curator Mason Klein writes in the exhibit\u2019s catalogue. According to Klein, Modigliani\u2019s family indicated that the artist\u2019s first experiences of anti-Semitism were his encounters with Drumont\u2019s screeds in Paris. The shock of that city\u2019s \u201csocial realities\u201d \u2014 among them, presumably, deep racism \u2014 prompted him to engage in a profound investigation of the relationship between appearance and identity that included a rejection of artistic movements, among them the avant-garde and Futurism, that disdained figurative approaches to the body.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an approach that the exhibit, to an extent, bears up. The qualities that so strikingly separate Modigliani\u2019s \u201cJewess\u201d from Drumont\u2019s Jew are seen throughout the drawings, sculptures and paintings that comprise the rest of the exhibit. Modigliani\u2019s emphasis on pared-down, idealized forms that deviated from accepted aesthetic standards is easy to understand as, in part, a response in which anti-Semitic caricature was considered a valid form of visual achievement.<\/p>\n

But the guiding conceit of Modigliani as a societal and artistic rebel who managed to be the sole wise appropriator of his time is too forced of a thesis to succeed completely. It\u2019s crafted to a modern moment in which the issue of cultural appropriation exerts powerful control, both for those who accept the premise that it\u2019s wrong to lift elements of a culture to which you were not born for purposes of boosting your own profile and profit, and for those who \u2014 often vociferously \u2014 reject it.<\/p>\n

Investigating the inequalities, misrepresentations and human costs of appropriation in the past is an important endeavor. But forcing Modigliani\u2019s work into the charged framework of a contemporary debate gives short shrift to the force of the art examined and flattens his deservedly complex legacy. One gets the feeling that the Museum\u2019s discussion of Modigliani\u2019s incorporation of African, East Asian and ancient influences has been mounted with the idea that if a fine enough argument in his defense is crafted, his legacy will be safe from the very questions that they themselves explore.<\/p>\n

Modigliani was an artist of expansive vision and rigorous practice. One wonders how the exhibit might read if those who organized it trusted its audience to adopt a similar mindset. It is possible to adore an artist \u2014 and who could refuse to adore this one? \u2014 appreciate his complex motivations alongside his complex accomplishments, and be open to the idea that his artistic practices might have contributed to a trend that caused, to whatever ephemeral degree, some harm.<\/p>\n

The last item of the exhibit, following a wall of extraordinary painted caryatids \u2014 Modigliani had a productive fascination with the ancient Greek sculptures, which doubled as structural supports \u2014 is a death mask of Modigliani, cast in plaster by the artist Mo\u00efse Kisling and Conrad Moricand, who botched the job, leaving it to be salvaged by the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. John Updike reflected on the object in a 1960 poem published in The New Yorker, asking \u201cCould the man have been that small?\u201d Perhaps in life. No need to be in legacy.<\/p>\n

*This article was published in The Forward on September 19, 2017. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Talya Zax* In the first room of the Jewish Museum\u2019s new exhibit \u201cModigliani Unmasked,\u201d a case displays two issues of La Libre Parole, the early-20th century French anti-Semitic newspaper founded by \u00c9douard Drumont. The covers of both feature caricatures of Jewish men, their features overblown and bulbous. Hung on a nearby wall is Modigliani\u2019s… leggi <\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4296,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7613],"tags":[],"position":[],"class_list":["post-4359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-italian-word-of-the-week"],"yoast_head":"\nITALICS Modigliani in New York - Pagine Ebraiche International<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/moked.it\/international\/2017\/10\/02\/italics-modigliani-new-york\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"ITALICS Modigliani in New York - Pagine Ebraiche International\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Talya Zax* In the first room of the Jewish Museum\u2019s new exhibit \u201cModigliani Unmasked,\u201d a case displays two issues of La Libre Parole, the early-20th century French anti-Semitic newspaper founded by \u00c9douard Drumont. 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