Art: Bad Boy Of The School Of Paris

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Sickly almost from birth--pleurisy, then typhoid, both of them preludes to the tuberculosis that would kill him in 1920, at age 35--Modigliani became consumed by art as a child. In his early teens he quit school to study drawing full time, and in the years that followed he would study painting in Florence and sculpture in the marble quarries of Carrara. By 1906 he was ready for Paris. It was by then the cockpit of modernity, the Paris of Picasso, Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck. Some of the first canvases in this show are portraits of women painted in Modigliani's earliest style, a gaunt Expressionism bearing all the signs of Edvard Munch and Picasso's by then discarded Blue Period, undertaken with broken brushwork learned from the canvases of Cezanne. It's competent, even sometimes a bit chilling in that entertaining woman-as-vampire mode of Expressionism. All the same, it's derivative of styles and psychological preoccupations that the Left Bank was leaving behind.

Soon enough, so was he. Paris would place before Modigliani its full arsenal of new ideas. Like Picasso, he would make a crucial encounter there with African wood carvings. Their wild distortion of the human face and figure would point him in a new direction--for one thing, toward the asymmetrical almond eyes, sometimes painted without pupils, that became one of the signature tropes of his portraiture. Unlike Picasso, he used African sculpture not as a route into his fears and sexual obsessions but as a much more benign vocabulary of forms that could be joined with other influences to produce--and overproduce--his enigmatic, spiritualized faces. Over the next few years he would learn to borrow as well from the simplified language of Cambodian stonework, early Christian statuary and the geometric abstraction of ancient Cycladic sculpture.

Although his weak lungs made it hard for him to lift a hammer, Modigliani initially thought of himself as a sculptor more than a painter. Three years after his arrival in Paris, he would meet Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor whose search for simplified line and form would touch something deep in Modigliani. It was through his sculptures in particular, nearly all of them totemic busts like Head of a Woman from 1912, that he would arrive at the sign system that he carried back into painting--ovoid heads on elongated Mannerist necks, with the nose a long, sharp fuselage and the mouth a pert slot just below it.

Given the Sturm und Drang of his life, you would fully expect Modigliani to draw like Egon Schiele, tormented figures tied into knots by their own perplexities. Instead he deployed the most serene line in the whole School of Paris, a line that stretches back four centuries to the elongated figures of Pontormo and Parmigianino. Modigliani came to Paris not only as a Jew but also as an Italian, steeped in the art of the quattrocento and the High Renaissance and their Mannerist aftermath. You find the sources of his poised, limpid line in the elegant whiplashing of Botticelli and the Madonnas of Simone Martini. And that quizzical tilt to the head that you see in his 1919 portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne? It descends from the canted heads--a sign of humility--in Renaissance depictions of the Virgin.