The Fast Way

Amedeo Modigliani was handsome, sensual, tuberculous, and usually drunk. He hit Paris at 22, soon started a spree that death stopped in 1920, 14 years later. Sober hours he devoted to painting and a little sculpture. His artist friends, including Soutine, Brancusi and Utrillo, thought him great. His acquaintances thought him accursed. The police thought him a nuisance, closed his only one-man show because the nudes in it were so frankly sexy. The public never thought of him at all.

Today every art student knows Modigliani's name, and thousands more admire his work. Their numbers have been increased this year by a big Modigliani retrospective show at the Cleveland Museum. Last week the exhibition moved to Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. It is curiously unmodern: Modigliani cared for neither the bright splashy colors of Matisse nor the fine-chopped complexities of Picasso. People, naked or not, were what he painted.

Trapped between the bottle and the sickbed, he had to find a fast way of painting, one that took no particular study and needed little development. Compounded of his strengths and weaknesses, the style he settled for was as personal as a signature. Anybody who has seen one Modigliani can recognize a second one at a glance: almost all his painted people have swan necks, seesaw eyes and ski-run noses. Surprisingly enough, he was able to characterize each one sharply within that arbitrary formula. For traditional draftsmanship he substituted clear, smoothly looping lines that divide the canvas into locked swirls of space. Instead of a full palette he used a few colors ranging from the darkness of thick smoke to the brightness of red rust.

Modigliani's paintings lack size, as those of a sick young man are almost bound to do. But the natural elegance and sharpness of his art and his warmth of feeling for the friends and bed-companions he painted come close to compensating, sometimes, for his weaknesses.

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