In the summer of 1984, Livorno, the port town on the Tuscan coast, was the site of one of the biggest hoaxes in the history of Italian art.
The Museo Progressivo di Arte Moderna was planning to celebrate the centenary of the birth of one of the city’s most famous native sons, the artist, Amedeo Modigliani, with an exhibition of his sculptures. In search of new pieces, the curator of the museum, Vera Durbè, and her brother, Dario Durbè, the superintendent of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome, decided to dredge the Fosso Mediceo, a canal where Modigliani was thought to have thrown some of his sculptures before he left Livorno for Paris in 1909.
After eight days of digging, first one and then two other sculpted heads were found. The Durbè’s and other eminent experts promptly declared their authenticity. However, just before the heads were due to be exhibited, four university students revealed to the press that as a prank they had sculpted one of the heads with an electric drill and, in the dead of night, had thrown it into the canal.
Then a dockworker and would-be artist confessed that he had sculpted two heads and dumped them into the canal.
Seeing members of the often self-important and aloof art establishment in such a highly embarrassing position was the cause of much mirth throughout Italy. However, in the 20 days before the frauds were revealed, the sculptures had attracted more than 50,000 people from all over Italy to Livorno. With journalists and TV crews coming from the United States and Japan, renewed interest was sparked in Modigliani worldwide.
Born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno on July 12, 1884, Amedeo Clemente Modigliani, nicknamed Dedo or Modì, was a sickly child who, in 1895, contracted pleurisy and later typhoid. During his illness he discovered he wanted to be a painter. While working in the studio of Guglielmo Micheli (1866-1926) he met Giovanni Fattori (1828-1905) of the Macchiaioli school, who was later his teacher at art school in Florence. Studying in Venice from 1903 until 1905, Modigliani not only came into contact with modern art but also indulged in heavy drinking and drugs. In 1906, he moved to Paris, then the centre of the avant-garde.
In 1909, after a brief visit to Livorno, he returned to Paris, renting a studio in Montparnasse. After meeting Constantin Brancusi, he began concentrating on sculpting, creating totem- or mask-like busts with egg-shaped heads, swan-like necks, pursed lips, long noses and almond-shaped eyes. Although he exhibited several pieces at the Salon d’Automne of 1912, the dust from the stone and wood he used in his sculptures badly affected his already ailing lungs.
Forced to abandon sculpting, Modigilani returned to painting. Transferring his unique sculptural style onto his canvases, he turned out about 400 paintings, mostly portraits, often of his fellow artists Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Maurice Utrillo, his carousing crony. He painted with incredible speed, requiring only one or two sittings to complete each work, which he never retouched. He mixed elements of abstract art with aspects of African and Asian art in an extraordinary and highly individual way. His nudes reflect even greater intensity and sensuality. In fact, the police were so scandalised by the nudes in his first exhibition at the Berthe Weill Gallery in 1917 that they shut down the show.
A short, proud, handsome man, Mondigliani loved women and they loved him. Although he had many brief, tumultuous affairs, one of his longest, from 1914 until 1916, was with Beatrice Hastings (1879-1943), a British journalist. However, his final and most serious relationship was with Jeanne Hébuterne, his model, whom he met in 1916.
In 1918, with the war encroaching on Paris, his dealer Leopold Zborowski decided to decamp with Modigliani and some of his other artists to the south of France. There Zborowski hoped, in vain, to sell some of Modigliani’s works to rich tourists. While there, Modigliani painted some of his best pictures.
By the time Modigliani returned to Paris in 1919, with Hébuterne and their infant daughter, his health was deteriorating rapidly. He was penniless, as it was not unusual for him to sell his paintings for the price of a few drinks. Ravaged by dissipation, he died of tuberculosis, aged 35, at the Hópital de la Charité in Paris on January 24, 1920.
Although Modigliani was not yet famous, a large crowd of painters, models and friends from his drinking days and nights in Montmartre and Montparnasse attended his funeral and accompanied him to his final resting place at the Père Lachaise cemetery. Heavily pregnant with their second child, Hébuterne, committed suicide the day after his death, throwing herself out of a fifth-floor window at her parents’ home.
Their surviving daughter, Jeanne (1918-1984), then 20 months, was adopted by Modigliani’s sister and grew up in Tuscany. As an adult she became an expert in the authentication of her father’s works (his paintings are amongst the most widely copied of any artist) and she wrote his biography. At the time of the controversy surrounding the three heads excavated in Livorno, Jeanne Modigliani mysteriously fell to her death in Paris. But that is another story…
For information on La Casa Natale Amedeo Modigliani (via Roma, 38, Livorno), contact Associazione Casa Natale Amedeo Modigliani Centro di documentazione: call 058/6808518; fax 058/6813514; or e-mail info@guastallacentroarte.com. The museum is currently closed due to a familial dispute.
