Today’s ‘Letter’ is inspired by a question written in to Nick Cave’s ‘Red Hand Files’, simply asking: ‘Do you have a painting that hit you like a wave of awe?’
In answer, Cave recreates the moment he first saw ‘Adoration of the Child Jesus’ by Stefan Lochner tucked away in a small, annexed room of a gallery, a picture he had long loved but never seen in person.
Unlike Cave, I had not gone looking for any particular painting the day I first saw ‘Seated Nude, 1916’ by Amedeo Modigliani, in The Courtauld Gallery in London… Suddenly, there she was! I still remember my surprise. The emotional intimacy of the painting knocked me out – hit me, indeed, with that wave of awe.
It is a painting that has always elicited strong emotions. When first shown in Paris, as part of a series of nudes (1916-18) it caused such a scandal, the exhibition was closed by the police!
Modigliani’s model and muse was the English writer and literary critic Beatrice Hastings, known in Paris as ‘La Poetesse Anglaise’. Their two year relationship, from 1914-16, though tempestuous, spanned a particularly creative artistic flowering for them both. Modigliani painted her some 14 times, but, for me, never more tenderly, than here.
Who was Beatrice Hastings?
If Modigliani gave her many faces, she herself wrote in many voices, using a vast array of pseudonyms. Even her most fixed identity Beatrice Hastings was a pen name, her real name was actually Emily Alice Haigh. She was extravagant in dress and behaviour, a free-thinking intellectual and feminist, and more than a match for Modigliani in drinking and volatility.
A key contributor to The New Age magazine, she also recorded her time in bohemian Paris with Modigliani. So, not only do we see her through his eyes, but we see him through hers: she describes him, rather clear sightedly, as ‘a pig and a pearl’ and as a ‘pale and ravishing villain’.
Despite her shape-shifting, now she is fixed forever, in, to my eyes, one of the most beautiful paintings ever made.
The Italian / English pairing gives me an excuse to link the Italian singer Paolo Conte’s song Via Con Me. Not officially written about any one person, I have always imagined it sung to an English lover – perhaps it’s the famous English refrain, with the surreal mention of ‘chips’!
