Modigliani at the Barnes on Its 100th Birthday: Substance, Sparkle, and Sensuality

A feast of scholarship on the artist’s paints, brushes, and chisels

M odigliani Up Close is the exacting, exquisite new exhibition at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. It’s far from weedy, weepy art history, or what passes for art history today. That’s the tut-tut, grievance-bedraggled school that uses art as a launching point, if it’s concerned with art at all. Modigliani Up Close isn’t really your father’s art history, either. Gathering 50 impressive works by Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), Up Close is the rare art-conservation exhibition, or, more precisely, a study of how the artist made his paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Modigliani’s technique hasn’t been studied and presented to a wide audience to the extent the Barnes now has.

It’s the Barnes’s 100th anniversary, too. A Modigliani exhibition, and this show has both sparkle and substance, makes sense. Dr. Albert Barnes, the founder and intellectual czar of the foundation, and the art world’s bête noire, owned more than a dozen choice Modigliani paintings, all acquired in his early days of collecting.

Up Close is fantastic, though I didn’t love it at first. The art and the catalogue are both feasts. The curators, though, chose to feed their scholarship to the public using an interpretation baby spoon. When I saw the exhibition, I was puzzled by why some objects were there since the labels were so minimalist. I sat down in the café, got a coffee, read chunks of the deep, rich catalogue, and went through Up Close again. “Ah, now that makes sense,” I said over and over.

The 1 percent that includes me isn’t the rich. It’s the lesser-known 1 percent of museum visitors who’ll do something like this. I had the time. Though in Philadelphia, I’m forever the country soul, and country people tend not to be overprogrammed.

Why serve the public only crumbs from the tasty génoise that’s the catalogue? It’s a Modigliani show, not Beanie Baby Christmas, and it’s at the Barnes, not Legoland. The visitors are serious and can handle complex material. It’s safe to say they’re at the Barnes because they love art and want to learn through seeing the best art, which is what the Barnes offers.

I didn’t know much about Modigliani except that, like the génoise, he was Italian, from a prosperous Jewish family in Livorno, north of Genoa. And I knew his 1917 Nu couché sold for $170 million at Christie’s in 2017. It’s one of 22 reclining-female nudes he painted. Liu Yiqian, a Shanghai billionaire who once sold handbags on the street, bought it. Modigliani’s career was short. He studied art in Florence, moved to Paris in 1906, made art at a frantic clip, had many flings with women who modeled for him, swam in absinthe, and died from tuberculosis.

He didn’t die poor and unknown like, say, Van Gogh. He had dealers and sold work. Police raided his only solo show, in Paris in 1917, because the nudes he displayed were said to be obscene. Paris art people knew him as part of a group that included Constantin Brancusi, Gino Severini, Chaïm Soutine, and Maurice Utrillo, but his nudes, palette, and trademark portraits of women with elongated necks made him his own thing.

I wouldn’t call Up Close a science show, though X-rays, infrared reflectography, and fluorescent spectrography loom large. It’s a class — beautifully presented — in the tools and approaches of master art conservators, who are trained in chemistry and radiology and often are themselves artists. When working with the best art historians, as they do here, the results are intricate and engrossing.

Modigliani was clearly a genius as a colorist, as we see from his portrait of Jean-Baptiste Alexandre from 1909. He was a high-end pharmacist, bearded, shown wearing a dark suit and holding a small crucifix so the look’s austere. His jacket only seems to be black, though. Looking closely, you can see it’s composed of bone black, Prussian blue, cobalt blue, passages of green, red lake (a translucent red that looks like a glaze on a cake), and vermilion. The early portraits have a bit of Matisse in their arbitrary color and a bit of Cézanne in the young artist’s arrangement of tones not in imperceptible transitions but in blocks of paint.

Modigliani did self-portraits. Self-Portrait as Pierrot shows the artist dressed as the sad clown from Italian commedia dell’arte. Pierrot is a French staple going back to Watteau, but Picasso, for example, kept the melancholic harlequin going as an avant-garde topic. Modigliani was manic and nicknamed “Modi” by his Paris friends. It’s a play on the French word maudit, meaning “cursed” or “devilish.” The portrait’s from 1915, when he was already high on booze and pot, possibly to hide his TB. Pierrot might have been, in his mind, a better analogy.

The portrait’s important for this but also for its introduction of Modigliani’s use of color and textures beneath the top layer of paint to fashion a picture’s look. This self-portrait is oil on layers of cardboard. He used the color of the layers, in this case green and buff, to become part of the surface. His nose, lips, and brows are single black lines of paint. In The Pretty Housewife from 1915, he used accents of saturated, thick ultramarine blue for outlines but, overall, layers of thinly applied paint — pale blue, minty green, vivid orange beneath a greenish black — to create velvety gestures.

Modigliani sometimes painted on used canvases, some already depicting portraits or landscapes, without bothering to scrape or cover the existing images. Rather, in pictures like Antonia from 1915, he allowed parts of the old images to peak through and be part of the finished painting. Antonia looks more three-dimensional because of it.

I have a few quibbles about the show’s sculpture section. There are eight head busts placed in cases in the center of the gallery of Modigliani’s early paintings. I thought the space was too packed. I understand why they’re there, in a way, since they date from 1911 or 1912, though one is from 1915. They’re early.

The material’s limestone, Paris’s ubiquitous construction material, and we learn that the blocks were either salvaged, which means swiped, from building sites or bought at workaday quarries near Paris. These aren’t Carrara-quality marble, which is the kind of stone Michelangelo or Bernini would use. Rather, Modigliani conceived of the sculptures as starting with found objects, not trash exactly, but cheap and common.

Head from the Fogg Museum, a female bust with big, oval eyes, giant eyebrows, a squashed nose, and a goofy smile, looks like a limestone de Kooning head. It’s roughly carved but entrancing. The catalogue but not the show introduces us to Modigliani’s chisels and files. I feel well trained now to break out of a jail cell. We can see Modigliani’s mark-making but also his incorporation of defects in the stone or marks from the mason at the construction site. Head of a Woman from the Philadelphia Museum of Art is made from a limestone block with distinctive spherical grains called oolites. He incorporates this feature in the overall design.

Modigliani looked to African masks and Cycladic sculpture for inspiration. He also, we learn, at least once displayed the heads in his studio hovel at night. Lit by candlelight, the group created a pagan-temple setting, enhanced, no doubt, by sex and drugs, no rock and roll needed. There are bits of candle wax on the objects left from the performance art.

Some of the heads are more resolved than others. The Barnes’s exhibition space isn’t unlimited, I know, but in a more perfect world I would have given them their own space with evocative lighting. They deserve their own environment. It’s where you bring Disney in as a lighting consultant. The limestone heads are on the order of a sideshow, since Modigliani did them for only a short period, and we don’t know whether he considered any of them finished or viewed them as experiments. His dealers never marketed them. They’re still teachable. He was mastering shapes and tools.

There are six large female nudes in the show, painted between 1917 and 1919, and they’re spectacular. No Italian artist painting a female nude would do so without thinking of Titian, starting with the warm glow of Titian’s flesh. Early portraits, and I’d include the splendid 1915 portrait of Paul Guillaume, Modigliani’s dealer, are angular and, rather than “sexless,” I’d call them “uncuddly.” They’re studies in color and shape and surface, abstract and modern. The nudes are lush.

The artist is still using layers of color and playing with the weave of a thick canvas to give the figure density or blue-gray underpaint to give her flesh a rosier color. The result, though, is a more curvaceous, sensual look. The Barnes’s Reclining Nude from the Back from 1917 lies on a rich burgundy sofa decorated with warm yellow patterns. Modigliani starts with a thin red-lake pigment, allowing the dense texture of the canvas to show. Then he applies red lake mixed with black more thickly. Then he scrapes this layer to create lozenge decoration. Over these patterns he paints an opaque, dull yellow-orange. It’s amazing.

I loved The Little Peasant from 1918. It’s on a canvas primed in white and painted thinly and loosely so the white, while not coming through, gives the picture a light glow. The show here analyzes Modigliani’s composition. If the canvas were divided into eighths, details like the subject’s fingers, waistcoat, shirt, neck, and eyes would stack in the fourth column. The figure’s asymmetrical, too, pitched to the left. This animates what could be a static composition, yet this boy managed to look serious, even stately.

I would have edited some of the bust portraits of women toward the end of the show. There’s a touch of sameness. One of his last subjects complained that she “got the same El Greco lines and the same figure that all of his women had. . . . The likeness of me was therefore not good.” This seems truer of his late work.

Modigliani tried to enlist in the French army early in the First World War but was rejected because of bad health. In 1918, the Germans bombed Paris by air, persuading Modigliani and his mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, to move to Nice for the duration. Getting models during the war wasn’t easy, so the artist painted lots of portraits of her. His figures continue to stretch into exotic serpentine shapes that look positively Mannerist. More and more, he uses pencil to develop the outlines of the figure, continuing to paint so thinly the pencil lines show. This adds structure that complements a fluffier application of paint.

When he paints portraits of Roger Dutilleul and Léopold Zborowski, his dealer, in 1919, Modigliani’s after a new simplicity. He’s less interested in improvisation, as he was when using old, already painted canvases and seeing what happened. His canvases are new, with pre-primed, commercial lead-white grounds. For backgrounds and clothing, he uses a stiff bristle brush to make quick, short, splayed strokes that both reveal the white ground and look feathery. His details are crisper and sharper.

Modigliani’s 1919 self-portrait is far from his self-portrait as Pierrot. He’s got a smooth, elegant look. He holds a palette depicting the paints he used in what would be one of his last works. In command of his brushes, colors, and pencil outlines, he looks very much the modern master.

Lots of good information from the catalogue ended up on the cutting-room floor, and that’s too bad. I suspect museum educators had a hand in the labels, and they tend to simplify and reduce. Of my label-writing pen, I’d say “from my cold dead hand,” to channel Charlton Heston. I tend to like density and gossipy tidbits.

There’s a five-page, single-spaced glossary in the catalogue. There were terms I didn’t know, so it was educational. I wouldn’t have had so elaborate a glossary wall panel — too much information — though in each gallery I would have done a glossary panel of key terms relevant to that gallery. The space on sculpture, for instance, would need a panel on stone-carving tools. Some galleries focus on color, others on grounds and canvas weaves.

The catalogue is a scholarly triumph. I never felt it was too technical, though it’s not for a general reader. That’s fine. The Barnes started as an art school.

The Barnes Foundation has evolved into a traditional, though idiosyncratic, museum, but education and scholarship together are its mission. I’ll write a story in January on the Barnes’s permanent collection and its new home in Philadelphia’s Center City. This is the tenth anniversary of its relocation. I’ll minimally revisit the unique drama that was the move of the Barnes from suburban Merion to the city. That’s a flood of angst under the bridge. I’ll focus on Albert Barnes’s vision and taste and how they fare after a hundred years.