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

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. 

A haunting sense of the ancient and the apocalyptic

With the clock ticking, Friday evening proved the perfect time to catch the Giacometti at Tate Modern.

Much shorter than some of the gallery’s recent blockbusters, this includes sculpture and painting from the Swiss artist most famous for his elongated, highly textured figures.

The opening room is perhaps the most effective though, populated with a series of heads and busts on plinths that provide a perfect illustration of the breadth of Giacometti’s stylistic experimentation.

There are some wonderful, very naturalistic pieces here, including two of his brother, Diego, who was one of his most regular models. 

The second room takes us away from the naturalistic and into the realms of the abstract: Cubism and African art are obvious influences; the artist was almost an engineer at various points, creating constructions with moveable elements, while some of his ‘woman and man’ works do feel a tad obvious in the use of convex and concave.

The next room introduces us to the sorts of small works that Giacometti produced in order to make a living – and his links with Surrealism – and then we move into the realms of the familiar with his elongated human forms.

One reviewer raved about this exhibition as illustrating that Giacometti was every bit as great as “Degas, Picasso and Matisse”.

That is hyperbolic nonsense. First, why on Earth would you tag Degas to the other two? And then why would you tag Giacometti to them – the two superstars of 20th century Western art?

Make no mistake: it is a very, very good exhibition that illustrates how good Giacometti was. But while there is variety here, there is nothing like the variety of style and experimentation within a lifetime of work that marks out both Picasso and Matisse.

What the exhibition gives you, by the end, is something rather haunting: the half-painted plaster works seem to echo the ancient Classical past; there is something about the texture of his stick figures that, for me, evoked a sense of apocalypse; even of Pompeii’s charred dead.

Briefly, as one walks around, there is music. It comes from a film of Giacometti working and talking to interviewer between drags on a cigarette. The music complimented the works perfectly and this is an occasion where it would have been beneficial to have more.

The artist’s stick figures are iconic – including his dog, from 1951 (pictured above). And by the time you exit the final room, you have a sense of the power that they possess: at once primitive and yet strangely futuristic. The paintings are certainly interesting, but they are in an incredibly muted palette and seem more like preparatory works than finished ones.

Giacometti deserves his place in the upper reaches of the artistic pantheon and this is very much an exhibition that is worth seeing: but don’t let anyone kid you – he is not the equal of Picasso or Matisse.

• Giacometti is on until 10 September. Find out more at Tate Modern.

Painted gardens prove a peaceful tonic to modern life

Water Lillies (1916-26) Monet

Picasso observed that “art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life,” so what better way to start a weekend than to spend time in a gallery?

And even more than that, how therapeutic would that art be if it was to be about gardens?

The announcement of London’s first art blockbuster of 2016 was met by much muttering that the Royal Academy was merely chasing after the money of a sort of art show dilettante.

There seemed to be a suggestion that Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse was not quite ‘serious,’ as art goes.

The Wall of the Vegetable Garden, Yerres, Caillebotte

Even the Daily Mail got in on the act with a sneery piece about ‘Monet mania’.

But none of that was going to put off someone who has, in recent years, experienced Damascene moments when it comes to both of those named artists.

So a week ago, after work, The Other Half and I toddled along to Piccadilly.

It must be said that, in terms of the Matisse element of the exhibition, it’s a bit of a disappointment.

Organised in conjunction with the Cleveland Museum of Art, some paintings are being seen in London but not in the States and visa versa.

Woman and Child in a Meadow at Bougival, Morisot

In the US, according to the catalogue (which is rather poorly printed in terms of colour reproduction, by the way), there will be three Matisse’s on view that are not to be found in London.

The two here are not his finest, although Rose Marble Table (1917), on a second look, does generate light, even though, by Matisse’s standards, the background is downright muddy. Bloody geniuses.

But that’s being picky. There are fascinating works here by myriad other painters – some of whom were new or little-known to us – and then there are the works by Monet.

The exhibition opens with two fascinating pairings: first, of flower pictures by Renoir and Monet and then, Renoir’s Monet Painting In His Garden At Argenteuil together with the painting that Monet is shown working on, The Artist’s Garden in Argenteuil (A Corner of the Garden with Dahlias), from 1873.

View of a Garden, Linköping, Johan Fredrick Krouthén

The first duo are highly conventional still life paintings; the second sees both artists moving toward what we recognise today as an Impressionist approach.

The exhibition makes much of the rise of recreational gardening among the growing middle class and its influence on artists, although some painters continued to be inspired by their own preference for rather more traditional vegetable gardening – a group that included Camille Pissarro, who painted his kitchen garden.

And indeed, Gustave Caillebotte did the same, with The Wall of the Vegetable Garden, Yerres (1877) proving a rare pastel work in such exhibitions, and very modern, with its stark geometry.

The Terrace at Méric, Bazille

In making sure that the link between recreational gardening and painting is clear, there are exhibits of seed catalogues, magazines and other gardening materials, plus a rather marvelous film of Monet painting.

There are painters represented from around the world, including the likes of Joaquin Sorolla, with his Spanish courtyard gardens dripping in heat and the cool of shade.

In such terms, Frédéric Bazille’s The Terrace at Méric (1867), though unfinished, reeks of the warmth and light of the south.

The Birch Avenue in the Garden of Wannsee ... Libermann

We have the chance to meet up again with other artists, including Berthe Morisot, whose beautiful Woman and Child in a Meadow at Bougival from 1882 is on display, while there are the joys on a single Manet in Young Women Among Flowers from 1879.

There are several fine works by John Singer Sargent, and then there are the Scandinavians, Karl Nordström, Laurits Tuxen and Peder Krøyer.

For me, Johan Fredrik Krouthén’s View of a Garden, Linköping (1887-88), stood out from these works.

Murnau II, Kandinsky

Light-dappled paths leading through tree-filled gardens are a particularly successful recurring theme – Max Libermann’s The Birch Avenue in the Garden of Wannsee Looking West (1918) is just one excellent example.  

Setting aside the fact that whoever named the next part of the exhibition ‘Avant Gardens’ (hohoho) should be given a serious seeing to (fnar fnar), we then move into an explosion of colour. 

And what is very clear is that the artistic leap forward from red and white borders to riots of colour was made possible, in part at least, by improvements in botanical science. 

Emil Nolde’s canvases of flowers bring extra vivacity to the exhibition, as does Kandinsky’s wonderful Murnau II. 

Munch’s Apple Tree in a Garden (1932-42) is a revelation if one is primarily only familiar with The Scream. 

Rose Marble Table, Matisse

We are even treated to three fascinating small pieces by Klee, while Klimt’s Cottage Garden from 1905-07 is unmistakable and Santiago Rusiñol’s Gardens of Monforte (1917) has wonderful light.

But then, as throughout this exhibition, is Monet – taking an extraordinary artistic journey in one lifetime.

And the three vast Water Lillies canvases, from 1915-26, 1916-26 and 1915-26 (left to right as they are hung) are staggering. Now all hanging in different US galleries, they are reunited here, in Europe, for the first time in the best part of a century.

Like the paintings at the Orangerie in Paris, they have the power to evoke a sublime, almost spiritual response. Their apparent simplicity belies their power and their beauty.

So forget the cynics and the snide snobs. Quite simply, time spent contemplating these works is worth the admission price alone.

Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse is at the Royal Academy in London until 20 April.