Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [101]
Too handsome for his own good, Modi (as he was called) plunged into the bohemian life in Paris. Although poor as a pauper, he dressed to the hilt, with flying red scarf and loud corduroy suit. When the mood struck, he was wont to strip off his clothes, shouting to astounded café patrons, “Look at me! Don’t I look like a god?” With his friend painter Maurice Utrillo, Modi caroused all night in bars, chanting poetry, swilling down cheap wine and absinthe, and smoking hashish. Together they made airplanes out of banknotes and sailed them over trees. He treated his mistress abominably. Once, in a violent rage, he threw her out the window. “People like us have different rights from other people because we have different needs which put us ... above their morality,” he wrote.
Modi painted portraits for a few francs to buy drink, but poverty was a real handicap when it came to sculpture. For wood to carve, he stole railway ties. Modi never cared for modeling in clay. “Too much mud,” he said, so he pried up stone blocks from street beds at night. Like his neighbor, Brancusi, Modi carved simplified figures that radiate primeval power. “Your real duty is to save your dream,” Modi said. After drinking all night and selling the suit he was wearing to buy more wine, he caught pneumonia in the bitter cold of dawn. Modigliani died at the age of 35.
TWIN TITANS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: MATISSE AND PICASSO
If the first fifty years of twentieth-century art were reduced to two painters, they would be Picasso and Matisse, the “North and the South Pole” of art, in Picasso’s words. These two prolific French artists were indeed opposite points on the compass for all Modernist explorers. Each inspired a different form of revolt against realism, one of shape, the other of color. Picasso, in Cubism, broke up forms to recombine them in new ways. Matisse, not to describe form but to express feeling, launched a chromatic revolution.
MATISSE: IN LIVING COLOR. “You speak the language of color,” the aging Renoir told Henri Matisse (1869-1954). From the time Matisse pioneered jellybeanbright Fauve landscapes until the brilliant cutouts of his old age, Matisse believed, “Color was not given to us in order that we should imitate Nature,” he said, but “so that we can express our own emotions.”
Reaction against his early experiments was so violent, Matisse would not let his wife attend his groundbreaking 1905 exhibit. When an outraged viewer insisted, “It’s not a woman; it is a painting,” Matisse said that was exactly his idea: “Above all, I did not create a woman, I made a picture.” This was the basic premise of twentieth-century painting: art does not represent, but reconstructs, reality. Or, as the Cubist painter Braque put it, “It is a mistake to imitate what one wants to create.”
ART OF OMISSION. “You were born to simplify painting,” Matisse’s teacher, Gustave Moreau, told his pupil. It was as if Matisse put the overblown Salon style on a diet, stripping it down to bare bones. Throughout his long career, working 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, Matisse sought to eliminate nonessentials and retain only a subject’s most fundamental qualities. “Condensation of sensations ... constitutes a picture,” is how Matisse explained his technique. His preliminary sketches evolved from complex to simple, from particular to general, as one after the other he pared away extraneous details. A minimalist before the term existed, Matisse perfectly evoked sensual nudes in line drawings with barely a dozen strokes.
“FEEL-GOOD PAINTINGS.” Matisse lived in trying times. Countless strikes, uprisings, assassinations, and two world wars exploded around him. Yet his paintings with titles like “Joie de vivre” blithely ignored all social or political controversy. Matisse had “sun in his belly,