Poor Amedeo Modigliani, what a tough
life he led. I’m thinking this as I climb the steps to his last studio in
Montparnasse. It’s a classic artist’s garret with peeling paint and poor
lighting, and climbing the countless floors on a narrow stone tread, leaves me
winded.
It wouldn’t have been easy for a man with advanced tuberculosis. With
Tate Modern about to stage its Modigliani exhibition, I’ve come to number 8 Rue
de la Grande-Chaumière, his final home before he died tragically young in 1920.
At 35, he wasn’t just a victim of TB, but was suffering the toll of a
lifetime’s enthusiasm for alcohol and drugs.
Political
journalist Monia Kashmire and her chef husband Nicolas Derrstoff now live here,
and I’m about to try one of their new pop-up dinners themed around dishes from
Modigliani’s favourite local restaurant, the now defunct Chez Rosalie. The
studio is chic and comfortable, with stripped wooden floors, Tunisian
knick-knacks and a partially shaved Persian cat called Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Our evening meal is more
banquet than artist-on-a-budget, with nibbles and prosecco, baked aubergine,
slow-cooked coq au vin and rice pudding topped with rosewater ice-cream.
There’s absinthe, too, while Monia, a dead ringer for one of Modigliani’s serene
models, regales us with stories. “Modigliani was a great womaniser,” she says.
“He once mocked Picasso by asking: ‘Pablo, how do you make love to a cube?’”
To get a feel for
his impoverished Parisian world you need to divide your time between Montmartre
and the grittier Montparnasse – the latter was where artists migrated for cheap
rent. Despite the gentrification, there are still pockets of authentic
bohemianism to be found here.
On Monia Kashmire’s
tucked-away street stands the famous art suppliers Sennelier, alongside two
19th-century art schools. There’s Hôtel des Académies et des Arts too, where we
are staying in rooms decorated with stencilled nudes.
Opposite is the Académie Colarossi, where Modigliani met his
last lover, the 19-year-old art student Jeanne Hébuterne, in 1917, the year he staged
his only solo exhibition, at the Berthe Weill gallery. After a brief few hours,
the police closed the show. The reason? A public outcry at his depiction of
pubic hair.
Today, the
academy’s current students – primarily femmes d’un certain âge in
slubby linen – await their model’s arrival. In this large easel-cluttered space
there’s a smell of turps and oil paint, and an air of studied concentration
that’s more leisure-time bourgeois than spirited bohemian.
Even so, it’s good
to see Montparnasse’s artistic heritage thriving, as it is in the pavement
drinkers at La Rotonde, the sprawling corner cafe
Modigliani and Picasso patronised on nearby Boulevard du Montparnasse. The
proprietor often accepted paintings in lieu of payment.
Nowadays, it’s
reproductions of Modigliani’s nudes rather than originals that line the walls
but the place is otherwise pretty much unchanged: a pleasing mishmash of red
plush banquettes and fringed golden table lamps. Sitting outside,
people-watching with a pastis on a warm evening helps you understand why this
was considered a pole-position cafe.
In 1906, handsome
and fresh from Livorno, Modigliani settled among other émigré artists in the
Montmartre studio commune of Le Bateau-Lavoir, the Shoreditch of its time. He
quickly changed his Italian gear for the Montmartre vagabond look – adding an
occasional bad-boy swagger to gatherings by stripping in public.
The favourite
gathering point for artists at this time was Le
Moulin de la Galette on Rue Lepic. This former windmill is now
a smart restaurant, where you can savour John Dory with carrot mousseline while
looking at the courtyard where Renoir staged his 1876 masterpiece Bal
du Moulin de la Galette.
The Sacré-Coeur
basilica at that time was under construction, not to be completed until 1914,
and though its neighbourhood is now tourist-trodden, around Rue Lepic and Rue
Cortot you can still escape them and recreate Modigliani’s world: the cobbled
lanes, Paris’s only vineyard draped on a hillside, and pretty walled gardens.
It’s a short walk
from here to the Moulin Rouge, which in Modigliani’s day was
largely an outdoor venue dominated by a plaster elephant where belly dancers
gyrated. Now it’s all glittering costumes and feather boas – to see the show
while dining, you need to part with up to €195.
Modigliani had sold
little in his lifetime and was often beset by doubts. But if his early demise
from tubercular meningitis seems tragic, the drama was to continue. Two days
later, his distraught eight-months-pregnant lover, Jeanne Hébuterne, jumped to
her death from a fifth- floor window at her parents’ home. It was not until
1930 that her embittered family allowed her body to rest alongside the artist’s
in Père-Lachaise cemetery.
Modigliani only
achieved significant fame after his death. Within five years, his work began to
sell – rising in value to a record-breaking $170m paid for a reclining nude in
2015. It’s poignant to think of this when you stand in front of his grave – a simple
stone slab with the fitting epitaph, “Struck down by Death at the moment of
glory.”
Source: Guardian