Modern Martyr
The brief, bohemian transit of Amedeo Modigliani.
A Life
by Meryle Secrest
Knopf, 416 pp., $35
I want a short life but a full one.
Amedeo Modigliani got his wish. In 1920, at age 35, he died, toothless, of tubercular meningitis in a Parisian pauper’s hospital. It was a sordid end to a confident stride into the trenches of la vie maudite. The romance of heroic nonconformity, vital to the cult of bohemia, absorbed the squalor and blessed it. Léopold Zborowski, Modigliani’s primary dealer, declared him “made for the stars.” Clement Greenberg, writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, beatified him as one of the “martyrs of bohemia.” Meryle Secrest raises him into a parallel pantheon: that exalted roster of frail consumptives, sanctified through illness and death, who flutter through 19th-century French literature. If our martyr stank of brandy, ether, absinthe, and hashish, it was but cover for his stigmata.
The credibility of Secrest’s portrayal depends on how much porosity you permit in the distinction between facts and atmospherics. This book is significant less for what it tells about Modigliani than as a primer in the devolution of rules of evidence. Facts are few. Dedo, as the family called him, was born in Livorno on July 12, 1884. According to his daughter Jeanne, named after her mother, little more than that can be said with certainty. Her own 1958 study of his life, faulted by Secrest for being too cautious, is prudently concise. Jeanne’s contention that a definitive account “does not and never will exist” has not fazed a legion of subsequent hagiographers.
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