[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]

[Toulouse-Lautrec's Regular] Ladies & Gentleman, Suzanne Valadon

            There is no certainty many can draw from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s portrait of Suzanne Valadon, alone, propped in ennui, at a table, a bottle of wine at both her leisure and sole company.

Is she a regular? In what Paris haunt does she meet the inebriate state she’s bound to meet? And if not that very state of intoxication, is she planning to meet another to replace that intoxication with momentary flames?

            So much can be drawn from a portrait, particularly one of a woman who mothered the great Montmartre artist Maurice Utrillo, at beck and call to Lautrec, to Jean Renoir, to Edgar Degas, all of which could have been the possible father of Maurice, who’d developed an abuse of his own for alcohol by the age of 10, presumably, at the very moment Lautrec’s brush made congress with canvas, could have been in the depth of his many wanderlusting fits, walking the streets of Paris, in utter displace of a boy of his age.

            But during that very portrait, Valadon has no interest in Maurice’s whereabouts, nor her own; she’s unkempt, she has shredded the beauty the myth of Art History has passed down to us as heirlooms; and where myth makes immortal, witnessing a vision in abstract depth reminds us that before immortality was conceived, flesh and blood, trial and tribulation, bludgeoning at the spearhead of blunt objects, strangulation by garrote, has all left their mark as to remind us, no one reaches a timeless time without their time in timeless torture.

-Dontrell Lovet't

[Impressions of 1939] on e.e. Cumming's [Waterfall]

[Impressions of 1939] On e.e.Cumming's [Waterfall]

You wouldn't think it to look at it but one photograph cannot tell us anymore or any less than the next; the devil lives in idle detail, detail then is what our imagination dictates it to be; the unimaginative, all the same what is not imagined, needs not more than a moment's more to be informed of their own mangled existence.

Cummings imagines/imagined; perhaps not so simply as recreating the visual of a waterfall, though how gently, if not so gently, the water lands onto a pool of the previously fallen in sum.

For ourselves, we dream of what isn't, then wake to note the disparity and attempt, as Cummings, in drastic plights, to make what isn't so.

Cummings fails in this 1939 attempt; & if failure itself is defined as shortcomings of success unattached from one who has stepped into a precipice and broken every limb to make climbing out possible, then it is a badge of honor that all of us who've taken endeavors to live rather accept the inevitable stakes, presuppositions by nothing more than our very own imposed limits.

[The News of Amedeo Modigliani's Death]

            You could say she looks familiar, perhaps a woman you’ve seen while walking down the crowded sidewalks in a city you’re not a native of; her olive features appears she may be a descendant of that boot shaped peninsula in southern Europe, the one that lost its might and will to fight at the decimation of the Roman Empire, transforming itself into a nation of seduction rather brute force. Modigliani is Italy, and so is she, Marie, the daughter of the people, appearing in 1918, in the 24 year of Modigliani’s life, 2 years prior to his death. Perhaps it was an homage to a death he knew was impending, an inevitable obituary one writes, savoring their own vanity, so gargantuan, the subject of death itself fails to render it obsolete.

            This voice, all canvas, all olive texture in the frame, form and symmetry of Marie, is latent, then and now, a war-cry given a century after the conclusion of a war that has wiped clean a nation once occupied by its own illusions. Does this explain the grey emptiness in the eyes of Marie? Or the elongated stretch of her body, as if she herself is peering through a window with a distorted view as to investigate the gossip of a world gone quiet herself? And does she ever conclude those rumors to be of substantial truth?

            Indeed she does; so she pulls her hair behind her neck, wraps it in a dense black tie, dresses herself too in black, becoming two years prior, an attendant at the burial of her creator, her peace spoken from the dazzling arches of dulled lips.

-Dontrell Lovet't

[To Paint is to Love Again] on Henry Miller's A-plenty Passions

Any man who can take into account the reality of his very own destitution, smile, thenceforth uses this poverty to draw hunger as a means of non-conformity, is familiar with Henry Miller, even if they've never heard of his having once existed.

-then too are they familiar (without actuality of being) with Langston Hughes, Selby Jr., Bukowski, William Burroughs; all loss and all that will be loss allots only the very life demanded if the individual indeed desires unvarying individualism rather a collective passivity.

It doesn't take much gumption to follow a crowd, even being completely unaware, to aim, to not, bout face to walk against the heavy tides of zombies, takes an artist who has lost the fear of death, embraced a physical decline, an embrace dictating; if we shall die our individual clash against bouy
s bumping like herds heading submissively to slaughter, has been enough to take us farther beyond our physical end, if even a second following, it says, it has been enough.