Its an old question. Its manifestations are like sparks and fleeting, ambiguous forms capable of de-materialization. How do you reconcile the opposites between the sensual and the spiritual? Is defiance and disorder, as Modigliani seemed to imply, the only route to transport the creativity needed to solve the enigma and to achieve a new equilibrium of feeling without denying the extremes of its intensity.
His limestone heads are very revealing. They show a determination to save the sexual sinner from herself. A transcendentalized appearance suggests she inhabits another world, or at least an other-worldly state of mind. It all signifies Modigliani’s own contradictory attitude to women as seen in the contrast between canvases of reclining nudes and spiritualized heads. A duality, a love hate relationship taken up in the literary sense by D.H. Lawrence. The impulsive profane and the sacred; the exhibitionist primal animal body balanced against all soul and delicate interiority.
Art had already passed through a period where the exchange between madness and reason had modified its language, and in a radical manner. So called insanity in this age of reason, by seen as a byproduct of scientific rationalism and artistically an expression of the doom of yielding to instinct or encountering a goddess with a saving grace of a serious mind. Modigliani is tracing this world of Sade and Goya where man is cast into a darkness without origin, without limit and without nature; an ambiguity of chaos and the apocalypse in a void filled with the nothingness of unreason. Goya’s Nude Maja is becoming a Death and the Maiden story here, the transition between refinement and bestiality is blurring.
The question is whether painting is an empty substitute for Modigliani compared to the flesh and blood experiences for which they were substituting. Coming from a Judaic heritage, he was less perplexed by a fixation on the sometimes nauseating history of a crucifixion of the body for a glorification of the spirit; the famous guilt complex where the elevation of ideas is achieved at the expense of felt experience resulting in a terror of the procreative being. Portraiture had hidden the body under layers of clothing, and the romantic tradition and expressionists avoided the issue by leaving it out of the picture in favor of harmonics of light and shade.
Holland: Sometimes it came in sustained relationships with women like the British journalist and poet Beatrice Hastings. Hastings, under the name Alice Morning, wrote a running account of the Parisian art scene for an avant-garde journal called The New Age. She had a caregiver’s temperament (she collected stray animals and nursed wounded wasps back to health) and money she didn’t mind sharing, and she liked to get high. She was everything he needed. …as in her description of the louche goings-on at the home of the art collector Paul Alexandre. Alexandre, a wealthy physician drawn to the romance of the low-rent life, leased a crumbling 12-room mansion, scheduled for demolition by the city, and turned it into an emergency studio and living space for artists. He also lived on the premises, and Modigliani was one of many who came to dine at his table, crash on his floor and participate in boisterous parties and “pagan dances” fueled by drugs, many supplied by Alexandre himself. Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-modigliani-by-meryle-secrest.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1308741239-b5VgZ0OPCke0ByLM1pQvDA aa
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