[The Seduction of Modigliani]

In a syphilitic night, where clouds erode the sky and opens it in a French fashion, nothing much is left to seize other than the thought. The stillness is a remnant of the erosion, all are temporarily dead to the world, or temporarily dying at the spearhead of coitus; in continuum, coitus is the formula that expressed the finite of the body, the gesture of the painter to imitate.

In every epoch, there is one who is determined to attain that prime existence of wander; it is in that, where he detaches himself from any culture, brings limit to that culture and attribute to its eventual decay, whilst still holding on to his forbearance as an heirloom. This brings us to the numbered days of Amedeo Modigliani, the conundrum of Leghorn devoured by the lights of Paris. An artist who immortalized Rapheal, it was in the language of art expression itself that gave outrage to the being of Modiglianni.

Rapheal divided mankind into three genres; those who suffer helplessly, those that dream confusedly and those that are entranced by supernatural things; but there is another, a fourth I believe, and that is the one who scours the dream only to squander it. Descartes was unknown to Modigliani and thus art was not the only that needed to be when all is forgotten and discarded for its sake. And on his death bed, he still proclaimed in the words "Cara, Cara Italia," his love for Italy and its entirety in his heart. Though  he left Italy, he was never a motherless child or one illegitimately concealed.

To live amongst the likes of Jacob, of Picasso, to survive the fledgling flourish of Parisienne aura, Modigliani arrived with Italy inside of him as a woman who carries the whole of the world within her. It was of the most pristine, the most Florentine Italy that the Italian-Jewish painter represented, the Venician Republic before it had been plundered and fallen under his fellow Italian countryman Napoleon in 1797, after one thousand years of independence. It was not the Italy brought by Chirico, nurtured by Greek myth and German philosophy, it was a portraiture of his own reflection.

The cubist were intent, driven to reduce the human and its form to a simple structure. When in all regards art was accumulated in Paris, its accumulation meant the burial of Italy, of Spain, of Germany, of Russia. When the artist arrived in Paris, they soon became expatriots with no true nation of origin, for it was buried in them long before their arrival. It is in the portrait of Lunia Czechowska that Modigliani makes an endeavor to paint the way he breathes, resurrect and save his nationalism in the Levant, picturesque display in the form of the woman.

It is in woman that Modigliani expresses his anti-Descartes, anti-cubists forum. It is the symmetry of woman that seduces man one moment and renders him powerless the next. To indulge in the cubists notion that aimed to distort the human, in lieu the woman, would pull Modigliani not from his scouring of the dream but from his native Italy, which to him was the woman all together. The woman wasn't the vice it was for Picasso, Rodin, Simenon and Miller, it wasn't the vice alcohol and drugs were for him; woman was the means to his end, the art that would become an obsession, a harbinger behind their nude bodies, his eventual decay.

As poets of the 18th and 19th centuries demand much of the readers, Modigliani demanded nothing of the one who took into their eyes his caricatures but demanded more of himself. His posthumous fame, which came at the cost of his self-destruction and the self-murder of his wife and artist Jeanne Hebuterne, who threw herself from a fifth floor window from the grief of Amedeo's passing, taking the life of their unborn child with her. The stylist harmony in which he approached the female body, capturing in large part the seduction and charm that has long made men captives in their own creation, came with the cost it would for the old man who saves a city and in turn, is resented for it.

` Everything was deliberate in the work of Modigliani, even that of his own self-destruction. The incidence of woman becoming on his canvas or be it the coincidence of the much admired 1906 death of Paul Cezanne that coincides with the year Modigliani arrived in Paris, the true subject, the naked body, never eluded him. He was a born portrait-painter and what he saw in flesh was all the deliberation he took upon his gesture to recreate it as best any man who is a devout student of the female form could ever, or will ever again.

It was the naked form of the world that Modigliani wanted to truly capture, a world that no one man can ever fully see for himself, but borrow visions that sketches the world out into display. The nakedness of woman before his eyes gave Modigliani that complete vision of the world, authenticity, a rationality so painful he took to alcohol and drug abuse to self-medicate and dilute the weight of it all and if given the chance to breath again, to be resurrected, I do believe he would again inject the opiate of woman, the scent of her skin, the texture of her light and being, and self-destruct all over again.

In the nights, during the long walks deep in the winter of Madison, along Lake Menona, I visualize the portraits of Modigliani, a man after my own, who knew he owed the world a price and dealt with it best the way he could to pay it in full. The chaste brilliance that has become the memory of Modigliani itself is the stigma of the woman of then, the woman of now, that in their very birth, with their very becoming, is the homunculus of the world that unvarying demands in cruelty, if not in subtlety.

-Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]