The third big portrait show here in London is the Modigliani exhibition at the Tate Modern. The Soutine show at the Courtauld is small and impressed me within its very narrow range. The Cézanne at the National Portrait Gallery is a big show and provides lots to think about. This Modigliani is also a big show, but I’m not convinced that’s entirely a good thing.
We see him trying out different styles, particularly in the early portraits, but then the work becomes repetitive. Yes, here’s another oval with blank eyes stuck on a columnar neck. Some of the portraits are quite beautiful, but I couldn’t help thinking that he might have been better served by painting (or retaining) a little less.
And all this in a life that ended at age 35!
The exposition begins and ends with two intriguing self-portraits. The first, presenting himself as Pierrot, a sensitive and melancholy clown, feels right. The last, painted not long before his miserable death, is equally melancholy but shows a more self-aware man. Not quite late Schubert, but, like Schubert’s last great piano sonatas, it gives me the sense of a young man aware of what he will not live to accomplish.
But I don’t know how much he would have grown, how much more he would have accomplished. Many of the late works feel as though he’s ploughing the same fields, that he hasn’t found new ideas or modes of expression.
His early portraits of colleagues—Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, Juan Gris—have a wonderful vitality. They bring to life for me the excitement of the Parisian art world of the last century.
The central gallery features 12 nudes, sensuous, sometimes beautiful, often looking rather like soft porn (as contrasted to the harder porn–and more interesting work–of his contemporary Egon Schiele, for example). The Tate commentary, noting that these models were relatively well paid, maintains that these paintings show modern women taking control over their own bodies and livelihoods. I’m not convinced.
More interesting to me were early experiments in sculptural drawings of caryatids. Perhaps it was their character as explorations rather than finished works that led me to imagine more latent power than I found in the finished paintings. Oddly, these sculptural drawings feel more three dimensional than the portrait heads he actually carved. But the stone heads are powerful. Either because of the cost of the stone or his tuberculosis, he turned back to painting alone. That feels like a loss.
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