Modigliani's Muse is a collection of poetry based on the artist Modigliani. Modigliani painted human beings. No other modern artist focused so entirely on the human form, whether his medium was pencil, charcoal, oil, or sculpture. Simultaneously, Modigliani was an artist defined by the twentieth-century Paris of the early teens and twenties. He was deeply influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne and Henri Toulouse-Latrec, whose work he discovered shortly after his arrival in 1906.
I have loved Modigliani’s work all of my life. I first viewed his portrait, “Girl with a Necklace,” on my childhood trips to the Art Institute of Chicago. Modigliani’s girl captivated me, and I would find myself sitting before the portrait making up stories about her. In later years, I continued to look for Modigliani’s work in museums throughout the United States and the world. When I lived in New York, I spent hours before the collection of Modiglianis at the Museum of Modern Art and at the Metropolitan.
During the summer of 2002, on a scholarship at the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada, I began to write a series of poems about the artist’s life and art, including the life of Jeanne and his other sitters and close friends—from his art dealer, the Polish émigré, Zborowski, to his former lover, the risqué British journalist, Beatrice Hastings, as well as the important Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, who described Modigliani as an artist “entirely conquered by the ‘grand art’” and also, “that rarity, a painter who knew and loved poetry.” My series of poems soon grew into a book-length study of the artist and his world. Having written a dissertation on women’s life writing, I began to scrutinize my own investment in the work and ultimately wrote myself into the artist’s portraits and the lives of his sitters in a sequence that foregrounds the individual subjectivity a viewer brings to bear on the paintings.
In Modigliani’s Muse, I created an (auto)biography in poetry, and I am drawn to the fractured, compressed form of poetry in telling Modigliani’s life story because the individual poems allow windows into intense moments of that life. Individual poems give many speakers voices, including Modigliani’s mother in “Trellis, Eugenia” and the wife of Modigliani’s art dealer in “Anna’s Portrait.” In this way, photography is like poetry. A photograph captures a moment. A series of photographs act as another kind of charged history in images.
Modigliani's Muse was published by WordTech Communications on March 19, 2009.
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