PAINTED LADIES
Is a painting more than a drawing? One can say that drawing is about line and painting is about surface, offering richer physical and imaginative depths. The Jewish Museum’s exhibit Modigliani Unmasked intends to show that early in his career, between 1906 and 1915, the artist used drawing as his primary medium, exploring ideas that would shape, later, his iconic painted portraits.
Some artists produce drawings that are as compelling as their paintings and sculpture. Richard Serra’s oilstick drawings have the same density, gravity, and alchemical potential as his steel sculptures. Picasso’s drawings capture the inspirations, intellectual and cosmic, that lead to a painting. Modigliani’s drawings, in contrast, seem merely like tests. They map, with pencil line on paper, a composition before it’s committed to canvas. They are as tidy, as free from ambiguity, as a simple architectural plans. At the Jewish Museum, Modigliani’s drawings are hung beside the paintings that supersede them. In most cases there’s a direct translation from paper to canvas. The paintings have a gorgeous jewel-like sheen, but no more spatial or dramatic complexity than the drawings beside it. In fact Modigliani’s best known paintings retain the same strong graphic quality as the drawings; they’re lovely, stylized, emblems.
The first artwork one sees entering the exhibit is a portrait of the painter’s mistress Maude Abrantes called Nude in a Hat, and it is so good that it shames all the works that follow. The surface is heavy and clouded, build up in fat flat strokes of paint. Abrantes is glimpsed from above the waist from an odd angle, as if in passing, ready to slip out of the frame. She doesn’t offer herself easily; she is haunted, haughty, and willful. Her figure dissolves into her big black hat at the top, and into bare brushstrokes at the bottom.
The painting is stormy and unsettled, raw and physical.
A drawing might offer the same effects, but not one here does.
