Art: Bad Boy Of The School Of Paris

Even people who don't know much about art can tell you something about Amedeo Modigliani, the dissolute wild man of Montparnasse, wolfishly handsome, penniless, tubercular, drinking his way toward an early grave while sweeping up his superabundance of lovers, the last of them Jeanne Hebuterne, the art-school student who was carrying his child when he died and who would take her own life the next day. It's no surprise that there's a movie of his life on the way, starring Andy Garcia. The surprise is that it took so long.

The lure of Modigliani's pinwheeling life may help to explain the long lines outside the Jewish Museum in New York City, where "Modigliani: Beyond the Myth" opened earlier this month. (It remains there through Sept. 19, then moves on to Toronto and Washington.) But the famous charm of his art is the other explanation. He settled early upon a formula of powerful appeal, a convergence of fastidious lines and abstracted facial features, of intimacy and enigma, that made modernism inviting, even comfortable. He didn't dynamite the human form as Picasso did or distill it to its essence like Matisse. In Modigliani's work the figure doesn't look aggressively, truculently modern. Modernized is more like it, gently conformed to what would turn out to be the ever emerging middle-class notion of newness.

Intelligently done all the same. His reputation is firm enough, but like Marc Chagall, Modigliani is one of those artists who have always been more popular with the public than with critics. His charm can seem too creamy sometimes, his legend so large it starts to overwhelm the output of his brief life. The Jewish Museum show, which was organized by curator Mason Klein, seeks to complicate our understanding of Modigliani. For one thing, it argues that each of his portraits is a signpost of the outsider, that Modigliani's art is the outcome of his position as a stranger in the Paris art world, an Italian and a Sephardic Jew in a France where the air was still poisoned by the Dreyfus affair. ("I am Modigliani, Jew" is how he sometimes introduced himself, especially after he got his first taste of French anti-Semitism.) Even if you don't entirely buy Klein's thesis that the masking and unmasking of unresolved identities was at the heart of Modigliani's intentions, the show, with its suave canvases and its powerful ensemble of carved limestone heads, is a reminder that Modigliani was not just every bit as beguiling as we have always thought him to be but also better, deeper.

He could be a difficult man. "As inhuman as glass" is how he was once recalled by his friend Max Jacob, the gay French poet and Jewish convert to Catholicism who also insinuated himself for a time deeply into the life of Picasso: "Everything in [him] tended toward purity in art. His insupportable pride, his black ingratitude, his haughtiness." But Modigliani sprang after all from a proud and unconventional family. He was born in the Tuscan port town of Livorno, a cosmopolitan city where Jews had lived freely since the Renaissance. Educated and progressive--his mother shocked her in-laws by starting a private school; his socialist brother was jailed for his political activities--his family had once been prosperous as well. But by the time of his birth, in 1884, they had been reduced to poverty by the failure of his father's businesses.