Portrait of a Young Woman, Seated
Portrait of a Young Woman, Seated, 1915, Amedeo Modigliani
Currently, there is a small exhibition in the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Octagon Gallery that has brought to light two outstanding paintings which, remarkably, are normally kept in the holding collection, away from public view. These two paintings also have something of a sentimental value for me.
Back in the early spring of 1987 I would often travel up from Harrow-on-the-Hill where I was working to look around Cambridge. I had a routine of being at the Fitzwilliam Museum at 10.00, then lunch in the sadly long-departed Eraina Tavern (now Smokeworks in Free School Lane) and then a mooch around the city centre. I rapidly fell in love with the place and by the July of that year, I had found a job just outside Cambridge and a house in West Chesterton where I still live, 33 years later!
For some reason, despite all the wonders of the Fitzwilliam it was these two paintings (which at that time were on permanent display) that really got under my skin; that lingered in the memory. One was called At the Dressmakers by Marie Louise von Motesïczky and the other is today’s featured painting. Here we are at the Café La Rotonde in Montparnasse, sitting across the table from this expressive, enigmatic woman on the bench-seat that runs across the length of the room in front of the windows looking out onto the street of which we can detect no detail. There are hints of a blind above her head but otherwise the background is a vague array of shadows, swirls and scratched impressions.
Her auburn hair is centre-parted and drawn together at the peak of her head to form a sweeping pony-tail that falls around that gracefully mannered, elongated neck. With the simplest of brush-strokes – the arched eye-brows, the flip of the petite upturned nose and the pursed lips forming that oh, so delicate smile. . . her rouged face tilts towards us in a coquettish, gently questioning way. She wears what appears to be a basic white shift tunic with the simplest of black embellishments across the upper arms while her wrist and hand wrap themselves around what might be a bag or a cushion, or maybe even the head of a child - but either way, they combine to form a near perfect circular shield that she holds to her breast. But the thing that really draws us in, the thing that we can’t free ourselves from - is that intense, dark, eyeless gaze. It is the way the artist has made everything that surrounds the head of the woman indistinct, a near monochrome palette so that the intense colour of that oval delphian face is all we can focus upon, and above all, those almond eyes - commanding our undivided attention. This is sublime, artful portraiture – with such simple devices, Modigliani manages to create a persona that begs to be interrogated. All we see is ambiguous, obscure and uncertain. . . just who is that girl?
Actually, there’s a simple answer to that question. It’s English writer and poet, Beatrice Hastings and oft companion and muse of Amedeo Modigliani during their shared time in Paris. When they first met at this café, Beatrice wrote:
“I sat opposite him. Hashish and brandy. Not at all impressed. Didn’t know who he was. He looked ugly, ferocious, greedy. ”
Not the most promising first impression – but it was a meeting that would transform both of their lives. Now 30 years old, Modigliani’s career was stalling. Prone to week-long bouts of drinking and bingeing on drugs, his inability to sell his work had driven him down a creative cul-de-sac.
Hastings, five years older than Modigliani, was attracted to his bohemian charisma, and he to her independence and breathtaking intelligence. Beatrice was 35 when she became Modigliani’s Beà, his reigning goddess and muse; the painter was five years younger. He thrived on chaos, and a powerful woman, even wilder than himself, was just what he needed to fire him up. Totally lacking in the traditional English reticence and reserve, Beatrice was sexually confident, physically aggressive and determined to take her pleasure in the same way as a man.
Their reckless, impassioned love-making alternated with violent quarrels. As Beatrice wrote herself:
“Once, we had a royal battle. Ten times up and down the house, he armed with a pot and me with a long straw brush. . . How happy I was!”
However, in today’s painting, Modigliani’s hot-blooded lover is relaxed and contemplative. In what was to become a signature stylization, Modigliani tilted her head, which surmounts an elongated, swan-like neck, a gesture he derived from the C.16th Italian Mannerist painters Pontormo and Parmigianino. Beatrice’s pencil-thin eyebrows, almond-shaped eyes, and the flattened roundness of her face resemble the features in the mask-like stone heads Modigliani had carved during 1909-1914, alluding to African, Egyptian, and Byzantine models; Beatrice kept one of these sculptures in her bedroom.
The wild romance between Modigliani and Beatrice is miraculous for having lasted as long as it did, if only about two years, before each of them moved on to new partners in mid-1916. Beatrice caught Modigliani in a rendezvous at the Rotonde with her French-Canadian friend Simone Thiroux (who later bore the artist a son, whom he did not acknowledge). After a public contretemps Modigliani threw a wine glass at Beatrice, leaving a scar above her eye.
Beatrice Hastings Assise, Amedeo Modigliani, 2015
Beatrice took up with the sculptor Alfredo Pina, another Italian. The final scene between Modigliani and Beatrice took place at the banquet Marie Vassilieff held in January 1917 to celebrate Braque’s recovery from a severe, wartime head wound. Knowing that Beatrice would appear with Pina, Vassilieff attempted to pay Modigliani to steer clear of the gathering. He showed up anyway, and as he burst through the door, Pina aimed a pistol at him. Vassilieff shoved Modigliani back into the street, while Picasso and a friend bolted the door behind him. . . way to go!
Unlike other avant-garde artists, Modigliani painted mainly portraits. Typically these were the unrealistically elongated forms with the enigmatic, melancholic air we’ve already seen and then, of course his many nudes. These all exhibit a graceful beauty and strange eroticism, sometimes demurely reflective, while at other times overtly sexual. Beatrice became the subject of many of these nudes. In the painting below, Beatrice displays a contemplative, reserved demeanour as she looks down, away from our gaze.
Seated Nude with Necklace,
Amedeo Modigliani, 1917
She nervously toys with the necklace she wears in her left hand while her right hand serves to cover something of her modesty. Modiglani focuses on the elegance of her slightly tilted head and gracefully held upper body while at the same time exploring the sensuous curves of her lower body and thighs. Unlike the passive reclining goddesses of Titian and Giorgione who are simply there to satisfy the male gaze, Beatrice controls how we look at her. Her shyness, slight embarrassment discomforts us and we feel perhaps we shouldn’t look.
And what became of Beatrice Hastings? She continued to forge her literary intentions and was a published poet. She also never let up on her, for then, unconventional approach to life, refusing to grow old gracefully. Something of her character, which appeared to remain consistent throughout her life, is revealed in this poem from 1910:
The Lost Baccante
I’ll tear me a robe from a tiger’s spine,
I’ll bind up my ruddy hair
In a band of tendrils plucked from the vine,
And ivy and grapes I will wear.
And I’ll leap the meadows toward the city,
Where the mortals dance to-night,
And wrench from the breast of the loved one pity,
And fill it with mad delight.
I’ll work in the milky heart of the maid.
With magic I’ll ripen her bosom scanty,
Till her lover gasp nor know that he clasp
No mortal maid, but a lost Bacchante.
Beatrice Hastings, 1910
In this autobiographical poem, Beatrice casts herself as a Baccante, an almost priest-like female follower of Bacchus. But here, the Baccante has become lost; a bacchanalian straggler seeking a soul to inhabit. And in this, she succeeds and magically possesses a city girl transforming her into a new being. . . the fiery souled, wild hearted, free spirited, sexually confident, independent being that Beatrice actually was.
Towards the end of her life Hastings felt excluded from the literary recognition she felt her due, and blamed an early lover, A.R. Orage, publisher of the New Age magazine whom she accused of conspiring to keep her out of literary circles in Britain. She published a pamphlet, The Old New Age (1936), in which she bitterly criticised Orage, calling him: a rustic, a lout, a snob. Hastings claimed that she had offended Orage’s masculine amour-propre, and for this, she was made the victim of a social cabal; a literary boycott that does, or should, matter to every reading person. While much of the contents of this pamphlet are thought to be exaggerated, it nevertheless shines a light not only on Orage's already well-documented misogyny, but the wider experience of being a female author in the 1910s.Beatrice articulates her feelings of utter frustration at the place of a woman in the literary world of the time – this from 1924:
“We women have to learn to write as we feel. We, of this age, do not know how! The stupidity of the time has made of us something between a précieuse and a school-boy. We give way, break down, undress--and then you see what ruins we be!”
In 1943, probably suffering from cancer, she killed herself with gas from a domestic cooker. As for Amedeo Modigliani, the trajectory of his life after their brief affair is so well documented it would take another article to even scratch the surface of the story. All I would say is that while some might comment that he ended up becoming a painter of characteristic archetypes, be it nudes, collectors, drinking buddies, seated women, they all fell into Modigliani’s hazy-eyed chasm. Yes, simple at first glance, but his portraits reveal an enticing, appealing depth. As an honest artist, he did not attempt to shock or expect any reaction from the public with his unconventional style, but simply to say: This is what I see; this is what I feel.
