Passion Play

Four years ago at a Sotheby's auction, a painting by Amedeo Modigliani sold for $68.9 million. At the time it was one of the most expensive prices ever obtained for a painting through auction. It was sold to an anonymous Russian middleman via phone representing an anonymous Russian buyer. A billionaire oligarch? A wheeler-wheeler dealer mobster? Putin? Who knows except that the painting, "Nu Assis Sur un Divan" (If my high school French holds up), "Nude Sitting on a Divan," completed in 1917 will probably never be seen by the public.

Last month my girlfriend and I trekked over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sitting on the eastern edge of Central Park in Manhattan, a giant and regal home for history and art, perhaps the finest in the U.S. and one of the world's great museums, to see a display of Cubists, a show of the collection of Ronald Lauder, he the scion of the Lauder beauty products empire. We also found the gallery (there are dozens and dozens of them, a veritable maze of discovery in the great facility), which houses the great facility's only Modigliani (well, the only one on display). The gallery was empty, almost forgotten among so many other galleries with 10 centuries of masterpieces. Same model. Another nude.

The woman, Jeanne Hebuterne, was Modigliani's lover and mother of his child. She is the subject of much of Modigliani's work, his inspiration and passion. Getting within arm's length of the lithe figure of "Recumbent Nude," I easily transported back to their post-WW1 Paris studio.... the beginnings of modern art.... and, as a voyeur, could see and smell and hear the intimacy which inspired Modigliani. It is love of course.... sensuous, on fire and deep rooted with nothing else in the universe other than each other, a canvas and a brush painting with broad, maddening and determined speed, and in the end.... a sweaty clench and just desserts. For people with nothing there is great wealth, potential .... everything.... in love.

As it is sometimes with genius and focused determination, tragedy accompanies. Modigliani, an outcast from his well to do Italian family (as was Hebuterne with her family for taking up with the artist), remained poor, his art at the time never accepted. The great nudes, dripping with energy, passion and furnace heat, were traded for a month's lodgings, art supplies and weeks' worth of meals.

Hygiene and health were ignored and in 1920, three years after "Nude Sitting on a Divan" was finished, he died suddenly in a squalid room with only Jeanne at his bedside after contracting Tubercular Meningitis. He was 34. On the following day, his great love, heavily pregnant, inconsolable, broke free from the arms of her father and threw herself to her death from a fifth floor window.