Modigliani – bohemianism's poster boy

Nude, 1917

Modigliani was just 35 when he died in Paris, in 1920, of tuberculosis exacerbated by alcohol and drugs. Just after his funeral, Jeanne Hébuterne, eight months pregnant with the couple’s second child, threw herself out of a fifth-floor window.

He’d had just one solo exhibition (closed by the Parisian police after a day because of its ‘shocking’ nudes), sold only a few works – for little money – and died destitute.

If the stereotype of the self-destructive bohemian artist needed a poster boy, Modigliani would be a prime contender.

Young Gypsy, 1909

It’s fitting too that, like van Gogh, his work would only become appreciated and valued in the years after his death.

Tate Modern in London has been hosting a major Modigliani exhibition since November – it closes on 2 April – and after various false starts, The Other Half and I finally caught it, just before seeing the new Picasso exhibition in the same gallery.

The two men knew each other – but what strikes one most when seeing these two exhibitions so close together is the ferocity of their working: Modigliani over the latter part of his short career (he destroyed most of his early work) and Picasso particularly in the single year that the new exhibition seeks to shine a light on.

Both exhibitions also include works that are not the artist’s best, but which provide a deeper context for visitors.

The earliest of Modigliani’s works shown here reveal the influence of Cézanne – not least in the palette – before we reach the elongated figures that are instantly recognisable.

But one of the first exhibits, The Young Gypsy from 1909 tells us straight away where we’re headed, with its accentuated cheekbones, puckered lips and almondised eyes.

Portrait of Léopold Survage, 1918

There are plenty of these here – both nudes and portraits. In some, the line is exquisite – in others, less so, while there can be an archness in some of the portraits that helps to embed them firmly in your mind – the 1915 portrait of art dealer Paul Guillaume is a perfect example.

On a personal level, I was delighted to see that the curators had included his portrait of Leopold Survage, a fascinating artist who studied briefly under Matisse in 1905 and later followed in his footsteps to Collioure.

It’s impossible to know whether – and how – Modigliani would have developed were it not for his early death. Some art historians believe he would have gone on to much greater things, but his creativity was such that his work stays long in the mind – perhaps not least because he is pretty much impossible to categorise in terms of labels of any school or style. There is simply Modigliani.

• Modigliani is at Tate Modern until 2 April

Bogged down by it's own worthiness

You want to love A Wrinkle in Time. You really do. And in really good ways. There’s not a message in it that most people would disagree with. It has a fabulous line for young viewers about actually liking yourself – not dieting to extremes, for instance, not hating yourself and oh, so much more. It’s incredibly ethnically diverse.

All of this is good.

And yet …

Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel has now been adapted twice by Disney – in 2003, as a TV film and now in a big-screen version, directed by Ava DuVernay.

It tells the story of Meg Murry, a 13-year-old who has struggled to deal with the sudden and unexplained disappearance of her father, an astrophysicist, four years earlier.

But then her five-year-old brother, Charles Wallace, welcomes an eccentric stranger into the home, who introduces herself as Mrs Whatsit and mentions the tesseract, a form of space travel that their father had been experimenting with.

Before they know it, the two children – together with Calvin O’Keefe, a schoolmate of Meg’s – are tesseracted away by Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which (a trio of guardian angel figures) to search for the missing Alex Murry.

Parts of the film look sumptuous – the planet Uriel, for instance, seems to have been visualised via the artwork of Roger Dean and Chris Foss – but for too much of its 109 minutes, it plods rather than sparkles.

The three children are exceptionally well played by Storm Reid as Meg, Deric McCabe as Charles Wallace and Levi Miller as Calvin, but too often it feels as though Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell’s screenplay acts like concrete shoes.

There are some funny moments with the three Mrs – particularly Reese Witherspoon’s Mrs Whatsit, but Oprah Winfrey’s Mrs Which is all too reminiscent of Glinda, the Good Witch of the North from The Wizard of Oz, a film that this seems desperate to emulate.

Nothing is unique, of course, but influenced by alll manner of things. But there’s a scene here, involving a transformed Mrs Whatsit, that seems to have leapt straight out of the final segment of Fantasia 2000, where the green sprite brings life back to the world. Is this a deliberate case of a Disney film referencing a Disney film?

At the end, it manages to generate flickers of genuine emotion, but the fact that it ends up feeling like a morality tale – even though all the morals it espouses are laudable – is indicative of just how much it’s trapped in it’s own worthiness.

Still, it’ll doubtless upset Christian fundamentalists, as the books continue to do, even though L’Engle was very much trying to create a story that echoed her own liberal, Episcopalian faith.

Picasso 1932: a fascinating insight into the artist's mind

The Dream

For Pablo Picasso, 1932 was a tumultuous year. Famous and wealthy he might have been, but at 50, with his marriage to Olga Khokhlova on the rocks and already in a secret relationship with 22-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter, he was also restless.

Playing with surrealism at the same time as trying to best Henri Matisse in the colour stakes, it’s little wonder that his critics were questioning his ability to develop new work.

“The work that one does is a way of keeping a diary,” Picasso was quoted in L’Intransigeant as saying, that June, when his first major retrospective opened.

Tate’s new exhibition, Picasso 1932, takes on this one year in the artist’s life as a way of exploring his evolution as an artist at such a crucial stage of his career.

We begin on Christmas Day 1931. Having spent the day with family and friends at his home in Paris, Picasso completed a small painting – a surrealistic take on Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793), with a woman killing her rival.

Woman with a Dagger

It’s difficult to see Woman with Dagger as one of Picasso’s great works, but like so much that follows it, it offers a fascinating insight into the state of his mind.

Such is the nature of the artist’s work rate that this exhibition cannot hope to include every work from that period, but there is still so much – and of such variety – as to make you wonder at the sheer ferocity of productivity.

It was a year that saw Picasso produce a series of works based on Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion from his Isenheim altarpiece (1510-15), at the same time as he was creating a series of Dionysian paintings of beach scenes. An intriguing juxtaposition of themes.

Nude in a Black Armchair

There are prints here, works using charcoal and works using ink; a piece made with objects stuck into the paint on a canvas – a leaf, a butterfly – together with sculpture and paintings.

The curators have also used one room to partially recreate that first Picasso retrospective, including a 1901 Blue Period self portrait, Portrait of Olga in an Armchair (1918) and Les Trois Danseuses (1925).

But at the heart of the exhibition – as so clearly at the heart of that year in Picasso’s life – is Marie-Thérèse. Initially painted anonymously, his muse becomes less hidden as the days lengthened and warmed.

The Dream may have an oft-remarked phallic side of her head, suggesting she had sex on the brain, but it is a far more tender work than that might suggest. And a series of large canvases painted that spring effectively re-invented the nude.

Marie-Thérèse is seen with pale, lilac skin and blonde hair, arranged in ways that are sensuous and voluptuous, erotic and tender, with a wonderful simplicity of line: Nude in a Black Armchair is a perfect example.

Reclining Nude

Some of these are also interesting for illustrating the influence of Matisse in the use of decoration in the backgrounds.

It’s just one of the one of the points made in Jack Flam’s excellent Matisse and Picasso: The story of their rivalry and friendship, which is very much worth hunting down.

After the success of the June retrospective, Picasso left for the Normandy coast and continued painting his nudes, with some of them appearing to have flippers rather than limbs, as though they were morphing into sea creatures – possibly a reference to the prowess of Marie-Thérèse as a swimmer.

The Rescue

But that prowess nearly produced a tragedy late in the year, when Marie-Thérèse contracted a serious viral infection after swimming in the Marne. 

And so the artist embarked on a new series of works, picturing bathers drowning and bather being rescued. Marie-Thérèse is identifiable in both of these roles.

This was not art for patrons or dealers, but art for the artist. Art as autobiography; as Picasso himself said in the early summer of that year, as a diary.

Sometimes it can feel particularly difficult to get to grips with Picasso, so vast and wide a range of work did he produce over such a long life, that while this is clearly Tate Modern’s 2018 blockbuster, it offers a welcome opportunity to focus tighter and understand more clearly.

1932 is known as Picasso’s ‘year of wonders’. And Picasso 1932 is enough to leave a deep and lasting impression on visitors and will certainly merit a return visit.

• Picasso 1932 is on at Tate Modern until 9 September. 

Peter Rabbit – laughs aplenty, but no Paddington

Take a beloved, anthropomorphised children’s character, add in top-notch animation, give it a bit of modern ‘attitude’ and pow! you have a bona fide cinematic hit.

This seems to the thinking behind Peter Rabbit, Will Gluck’s new film, which is based on the stories of Beatrix Potter.

It’s entirely possible that Sony and co also thought that they could emulate Paddington, the first film of which was released in 2014, to almost universal acclaim. News of Gluck’s project first surfaced in April 2015.

It has already proved a success at the box office (it’s taken $123.6m against a budget of $50m at the time of writing), if not so much critically.

It’s been suggested that Potter would be rolling in her grave. Now it’s difficult to believe that, if you took the Tardis and visited her at her farm, sometime before her death in 1943, and showed her this film, she would be enraptured. Because this really is a different time.

Indeed, in 1938, Potter turned down a plan from Disney to film the story. In a letter to a friend, she wrote: “I am not very hopeful about the result. They propose to use cartoons; it seems that a succession of figures can be joggled together to give an impression of motion. I don’t think the pictures would be satisfactory ... I am not troubling myself about it!”

If we want to continue the comparisons, Paddington creator Michael Bond was writing a lot more recently, so his stories are far less difficult to update – indeed, he even appeared in the first film, so it’s safe to assume his approval.

This Peter Rabbit retains nothing of the late-Victorian gentility and pastoral quality of Potter’s original tale (written in 1893 and first published nine years later), even though the creative team includes a number of her original illustrations, supposedly painted here by struggling artist Bea, one of the two main human characters.

The plot is simple and continues the scenario set up but Potter: the ongoing struggle between Mr McGregor and the rabbits over the produce in the former’s garden – a struggle that we know claimed Peter’s father in days gone by.

Here, when the old man’s heart gives out in the middle of a particularly tough battle, the rabbits and their friends believe they have ensured the garden is theirs for ever, along with the house.

But that’s before McGregor’s fastidious nephew Thomas arrives – initially to sell his inherited property, before becoming smitten by near neighbour and rabbit lover Bea.

Rose Byrne and Domhnall Gleeson turn in sound performances as Bea and Thomas, but at the end of the day, this is mostly about the animals.

The animation is simply outstanding. Much of the voice characterisation is fine, but while James Corden as Peter is nowhere near as irritating as he can be, he’s also too old and too knowing to really make it work.

Indeed, that knowing quality is something that the film seems set on – perhaps in an effort to distance itself from the charm of Paddington even at the same time as time as trying to hitch itself to the same wagon. If there is a sense that it doesn’t entirely know what it wants to be, then perhaps that’s not surprising.

It was mostly filmed in Australia, which probably explains why it rarely manages to actually look like the English Lakes and why there is nothing even remotely like a Cumbrian accent to be heard.

There are, however, plenty of laugh-out-loud moments (the children in the cinema clearly loved it) and the animation really is excellent – and for a post-work, Friday evening trip to the movies, that’s not to be sniffed at.

Then again, perhaps in 25 years, it’ll have attained cult status, where showings are attended by furries, who pelt the screen with blackberries at the appropriate moment. Stranger things have happened …

Is it any good? I should Coco!

A couple of Oscars, a Bafta, a Golden Globe and more down the line, and in my continuing quest to see more Oscar-winning films before (or only very shortly thereafter) the awards than I’ve ever done before, I finally got around to seeing Coco, which won best animated feature and best original song when the Academy announced handed out the gongs at last Sunday’s jamboree.

A Disney-Pixar production, directed by Lee Unkrich and with a screenplay by Adrian Molina and Matthew Aldrich, it’s been hailed since opening – and not least for the respect the film shows to Mexican culture.

Premiering in Mexico at the Morelia International Film Festival last October, it opened in in the country a few days later, the weekend before Día de Muertos (the Day of the Dead).

Ninety-six years before the main action takes place, Imelda Rivera, the wife of a musician and with a three-year-old daughter, Coco, is left at home by her husband, who is pursuing his musical dreams. When he doesn’t return, she starts a shoemaking business that, almost a century later, has become a thriving family business.

But Imelda also laid down an edict, stringently enforced all these decades later by her own granddaughter, Elena, to ban music from the home.

Yet for all her efforts, Elena’s own grandson, 12-year-old Miguel, dreams of becoming a musician and has secretly taught himself to play a guitar from old black and white film footage of his idol, Ernesto.

On Día de Muertos, the boy uncovers an old picture that convinces him that Ernesto was actually his own great-great-grandfather. After Imelda destroys his own hand-made guitar, Miguel heads to the cemetery to see if he can steal the guitar from Ernesto’s mausoleum so that he can compete in a festive talent contest. But his attempt renders him invisible to everyone, except his street dog friend Dante and his own skeletal dead relatives, who take him to the Land of the Dead.

How can he get home and will he be banned from playing music or not?

Sumptuous to look at – and at times it’s actually difficult to remember this is not live action – Coco works on so many levels. Obviously primarily aimed at children, it’s a sensitive way of introducing themes of death and memory. Yet there is plenty to keep the grown-ups fully engaged.

It never falls into sentimentality, though is genuinely moving. The voice performances are excellent – not least Anthony Gonzalez, the 13-year-old playing Miguel. And it’s worth noting that the cast, barring one small character, all hail from Latin, indigenous or mixed backgrounds.

Coco is a joy – close, if not an equal to Pixar’s wonderful Up! and, despite it’s subject matter, every bit as life affirming.

And there is certain piquancy to the fact that, at a time when the resident of the White House behaves in such an undiplomatic, aggressive and arrogant way towards the USA’s southern neighbour, a film created in the US, showing great respect for Mexican culture, has become that country’s biggest-grossing picture ever. Perhaps 45 could learn something from that.