The British painter Nina Hamnett recalled that Modigliani had a very large, very untidy studio. Dangling from the end of his bed was a web inhabited by an enormous spider. ‘He explained that he could not make the bed as he had grown very attached to the spider and was afraid of disturbing it.’ This anecdote — in its combination of Bohemian squalor, fin-de-siècle strangeness, whimsical humour and delicacy of feeling — gives a few clues to the art of the man who slept in that bed.
More are provided by a nicely focused little exhibition at the Estorick Collection, Modigliani: A Unique Artistic Voice. It is made up of 30 drawings — many from the earlier part of the painter’s short career, plus one painting, a portrait from 1918. Altogether it makes clear that the subtitle of the show, though a bit of a cliché, gets one thing right. Amedeo Modigliani was unique.
This is one of the puzzling aspects of his work. Although born and brought up in Italy, Modigliani (1884–1920) lived in Paris for most of his adult life. That spider-ridden bedroom was in Montmartre, where Modigliani was a contemporary of the Cubists and the Fauves. But, though surrounded by the explosive beginnings of modern art, he was not exactly a modernist himself.
Wit is not the first quality you associate with Modigliani, but there is something lightly but deliberately comic about many of these works on paper. Indeed, there are moments, when looking at his stylisation and touches of waspish humour, that the name Aubrey Beardsley comes to mind more than that of Pablo Picasso.
The tiny, pursed mouths and huge noses of the stylised heads he drew in 1911 look as much like Osbert Lancaster as ancient Greek sculpture.
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