Today is the birthday of Max Jacob (Quimper, Finistère, Brittany 12 July 1876 – 5 March 1944 Drancy Deportation Camp); poet, painter, writer, and critic.  Max Jacob is regarded as an important link between the symbolists and the surrealists, as can be seen in his prose poems Le cornet à dés (The Dice Box, 1917 – the 1948 Gallimard edition was illustrated by Jean Hugo) and in his paintings.  His writings include the novel Saint Matorel (1911), the verses Le laboratoire central (1921), and Le défense de Tartuffe (1919), which expounds his philosophical and religious attitudes.

Having moved outside of Paris in May, 1936, to settle in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Loiret, Max Jacob was arrested on 24 February 1944 by the Gestapo, and interned at Orléans prison.  Jewish by birth, Jacob’s brother Gaston had been previously arrested in January, 1944, deported to Auschwitz concentration camp, and gassed upon arrival with his sister Myrthe-Lea.  Following his incarceration at Orléans, Max was then transferred to Drancy internment camp from where he was to be transported in the next convoy to Auschwitz in Poland.  However, said to be suffering from bronchial pneumonia, Max Jacob died in the infirmary.  First interred in Ivry, after the war ended in 1949 his remains were transferred by his artist friends Jean Cassou and René Iché (who sculpted the tomb of the poet) to the cemetery at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire in the Loiret department.

Après la mort de mon amour, oh ! de longs mois après, la douleur et la joie d’avoir aimé (t’aimè-je encore ?) après l’obscur charnier des ruptures sanglantes, et morte et mort et toi en moi et moi en toi, et morte et mort, moi que voici et toi là-bas, je te parlai, ô l’angélique, je te parlai de cette visite dans la neige à la porte de ta maison en ce Paris de velours blanc, pierre de lune, ombre et lumière en chaque rue. « Je savais que vous êtes fou, car tous les médecins vous le diront, les plus vrais fous sont les plus calmes. » Et morte et mort, et toi en moi et moi en toi, et morte et mort, moi que voici, et toi là-bas

Ballade de la visite nocturne, un des plus célèbres poèmes de Max Jacob. La « femme » en question est René Dulsou.

[…] mon Dieu joli. Je tiens tes bras entre mes bras et mon corps sur ton corps. […] Tu es encore plus beau qu’auparavant, chéri […]. J’aime à sentir ton corps dans mes bras […]. Ton ventre est dur aussi. […] Je suis amoureux de ton cadavre et je vois combien je t’aimais sans le savoir […] jeune homme plus que charmant, plus que séduisant […].

Mise au tombeau, hymne amoureux de Max Jacob au corps du Christ descendu de la croix.

Ah! L’envie me démange De te faire un ange, De te faire un ange En fourrageant ton sein, Marie Laurencin, Marie Laurencin!

Chansonnette galante de Max Jacob, vers 1908.

• 

  “Le pardon de Sainte-Anne”.

• 

  “Le clocher de Ploaré”.

• 

  “Le marché à Pont-l’Abbé”.

• 

  “Le calvaire de Guengat”. Quimper’s Musée des beaux-arts.

   

Today is the birthday of Amedeo Modigliani (Amedeo Clemente Modigliani; Livorno, Tuscany 12 July 1884 – 24 January 1920 Paris); painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France.  He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterized by elongation of faces and figures, that were not received well during his lifetime, but later found acceptance.  Modigliani spent his youth in Italy, where he studied the art of antiquity and the Renaissance, until he moved to Paris in 1906.  Modigliani’s œuvre includes paintings and drawings.  From 1909 to 1914, however, he devoted himself mainly to sculpture.  During his life, Amedeo Modigliani had little success, but after his death he achieved greater popularity.  He died at age 35 in Paris of tubercular meningitis.

He met the first serious love of his life, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, in 1910, when he was 26.  They had studios in the same building, and although 21-year-old Anna was recently married, they began an affair.  Anna was tall (as Modigliani was only 5 foot 5 inches) with dark hair (like Modigliani’s), pale skin and grey-green eyes, she embodied Modigliani’s aesthetic ideal and the pair became engrossed in each other.  After a year, however, Anna returned to her husband.

In the spring of 1917, the Russian sculptor Chana Orloff introduced him to a beautiful 19-year-old art student named Jeanne Hébuterne.  From a conservative bourgeois background, Hébuterne was renounced by her devout Roman Catholic family for her liaison with Modigliani, whom they saw as little more than a debauched derelict.  Despite her family’s objections, soon they were living together.  Modigliani ended his relationship with the English poet and art critic Beatrice Hastings and a short time later Hebuterne and Modigliani moved together into a studio on the Rue de la Grande Chaumière. Jeanne began to pose for him and appears in several of his paintings.  Hébuterne became a principal subject for Modigliani’s art.  Towards the end of the First World War, early in 1918, Modigliani left Paris with Hébuterne to escape from the war and travelled to Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer.  They would spend a year in France.  In May 1919 they returned to Paris with their infant daughter and moved into an apartment on the rue de la Grande Chaumière.  After Hébuterne became pregnant again, Modigliani got engaged to her, but Jeanne’s parents were against the marriage, especially because of Modigliani’s reputation as an alcoholic and drug user.  The wedding plans were shattered independently of Jeanne’s parents’ resistance when Modigliani discovered he had a severe form of tuberculosis.

After not hearing from him for several days, a neighbour checked on the family and found Modigliani in bed delirious and holding onto Hébuterne. A doctor was summoned, but little could be done because Modigliani was in the final stage of his disease.  He died at the Hôpital de la Charité.  There was an enormous funeral, attended by many from the artistic communities in Montmartre and Montparnasse.  When Modigliani died, twenty-one-year-old Hébuterne was eight months pregnant with their second child.  A day later, Hébuterne was taken to her parents’ home.  There, inconsolable, she threw herself out of a fifth-floor window, a day after Modigliani’s death, killing herself and her unborn child.  Modigliani was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery.  Hébuterne was buried at the Cimetière de Bagneux near Paris, and it was not until 1930 that her embittered family allowed her body to be moved to rest beside Modigliani.  A single tombstone honors them both.  His epitaph reads: “Struck down by Death at the moment of glory”.  Hers reads: “Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice”.  Managing only one solo exhibition in his life and giving his work away in exchange for meals in restaurants, Modigliani died destitute.

 

 

 

• 

  Portrait of Maude Abrantes, 1907

• 

  Paul Guillaume, Novo Pilota, 1915

• 

  Bride and Groom, 1915

• 

  Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz, 1916

• 

  Jean Cocteau, 1916, Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum

• 

  Léon Indenbaum, 1916, Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum

• 

  Portrait of Beatrice Hastings, 1916

• 

  Female nude; Iris Tree, c. 1916

• 

  Portrait of Moise Kisling, 1915

• 

  Madame Kisling, 1917

• 

  Nude Sitting on a Divan (“La Belle Romaine”), 1917

• 

  Jeanne Hébuterne, 1918

• 

  Dedie Hayden, 1918, Centre Georges Pompidou

• 

  Self-portrait, 1919, oil on canvas, Museum of Contemporary Art, São Paulo, Brazil

• 

  Gypsy Woman with Baby, 1919, National Gallery of Art

• 

  The little peasant, 1918, Tate Liverpool

• 

  Portrait of a Young Woman, 1918, New Orleans Museum of Art

• 

  Buste de femme, unknown, before 1919, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires)

• 

  Beatrice Hastings, 1916-1919, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

• 

  Woman with a Fan, 1919, stolen from Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

• 

  Portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne, Seated, 1918, Israel Museum, Jerusalem

 

• Nudes
• 

  Reclining Nude, 1917, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

• 

  Nu couché, 1917-18, sold for $170.4 million in 2015

• 

  Nude on a Blue Cushion, 1917