A fascinating documentary explores the unlikely friendship between two of modern art's most compelling figures - Amedeo Modigliani and Chaim Soutine - whose shared passion for art, from Rembrandt to Cézanne, from the Louvre to the Trocadéro, would unite them in early 20th century Paris.
Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) has become a legend through his angelic face, life of poverty, immoderate taste for alcohol and drugs, and death at age 35. "Modigliani-Soutine, Last Bohemians of Montparnasse," a documentary directed by Catherine Aventurier in 2016, opens with the beautiful Apollonian face of Modigliani, who was more inclined toward the Dionysian side of existence. He was "the last of the cursed painters," this archetype of the artist who had been a Parisian by adoption for eight years - the Italian prince of Montparnasse who recited verses from Dante and carried everywhere with him Lautréamont's "Songs of Maldoror." As Sophie Krebs, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, notes, he was an "authentic bohemian who refused to make his art a means to live."
In stark contrast stood Chaim Soutine (1893-1943), a Jewish Russian emigrant to Paris, a Slav from the Russian borderlands born near Minsk in Belarus, barely speaking French. He was "ugly to some, dirty to others," and lacked Modigliani's same presence. His carnal canvases disturbed and shocked, even though he was considered "a prophet of painting across the Atlantic" and Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, and Francis Bacon claimed to be his heirs. It was almost like the portrait of Dorian Gray in two characters - the reverse and the front, everything and its opposite.
The two artists met in Paris in 1915, in the midst of war, through the intermediary of Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973), who wanted to introduce Ashkenazi Jewish artists to Modigliani, who until then had been more marked by secularism than by his Jewish identity. Their improbable and lightning friendship would last only five years. Marc Chagall, originally from Vitebsk like Ossip Zadkine, and Moïse Kisling from Krakow represented a new world of art opening before his eyes. As Marie-Amélie Senot, curator at LaM in Villeneuve-d'Ascq (Nord), analyzes, "They had in common the Jewish culture of debate and questioning, numerous texts."
Soutine's background was particularly harsh. Born into a very large and very poor family, he sketched as a child, then dared to draw the village rabbi - forbidden by the Torah, which prohibits figuration. The rabbi's son, a butcher, punished him by beating him severely. His family obtained financial compensation and sent Soutine to the fine arts school in Vilnius. He arrived in Paris penniless, landing at La Ruche where Jewish artists fleeing pogroms and the historical anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe had found anchor.
Both Soutine and Modigliani were declared unfit for military service for health reasons. They remained in Paris with the men of fighting age who stayed behind the front - foreigners and the sick. Between contempt and tolerance, they were allowed to work. They shared their studio, infested with bedbugs, at Cité Falguière, along with their misery, hunger, and cold. Modigliani recognized Soutine's talent - his junior by ten years - and became his mentor. He would paint at least four portraits of Soutine, giving them a mixture of strength, symbolism, and diaphanous poetry.
The film, written by Nathalie Bourdon and Catherine Aventurier, tells through these two great painters - united by their common taste for French art, old masters, and classical art (Cézanne for Modigliani, Rembrandt for Soutine) - the birth of the School of Paris. This documentary captures not just their artistic development but also the broader cultural transformation taking place in Paris during this pivotal period in art history, when foreign artists were reshaping the landscape of modern painting through their unique perspectives and experiences.
