Old-Fashioned Modernist

Modigliani was a mass of contradictions

- Laura Gascoigne

When planning a taboo breaking exhibition, don’t choose a venue opposite a police station. That was the lesson learned by Amedeo Modigliani’s dealer Léopold Zborowski when, in December 1917, he hung four of the artist’s nudes in the window of Galerie Berthe Weill in the Rue Lafitte, Paris, attracting a visit from the police commissioner, who then demanded their removal.

Surrounded by the six Modigliani nudes in Tate Modern’s exhibition, one can guess what the commissioner found shocking. Unlike the compliant nudes of French academic painting, Modigliani’s models were not shown in states of erotic abandon. They were self-possessed modern women wearing nothing but rouge and that—rather than the pubic hair to which the commissioner objected—was the problem.

Born into an old Italian-Jewish family in Livorno in 1884, Modigliani was, in some ways, surprisingly old-fashioned. ‘If a woman poses for you, she gives herself to you,’ he cautioned a friend in 1914 who had wanted to paint his then muse, the writer Beatrice hastings, represented in the exhibition as Madam Pompadour (1915).