‘What I am searching for is neither the real nor the unreal, but the subconscious, the mystery of what is instinctive in the human race.’
Tête de face avec collier is a meditation on Modigliani's quest for definitive form. Employing a simplification and purification of physiognomic features, Modigliani drew on an abundance of anthropological forms which he encountered in the museums of Paris. We find elements here of the small oval mouths of the wooden Baule masks from the Ivory Coast, the blank almond-shaped eyes of Egyptian art, whilst simultaneously emulating a sense of quiet solemnity and spirituality that reflect the sculptures of Eastern Buddhism. Griselda Pollock has written on this aspect of Modigliani’s work, stating that his ‘project echoes that of Matisse, where the distillation of movement, volume, and form into the sureness of a single line negotiates the tightrope between the decorative and the minimal...[Modigliani’s] patient repetitions and persistent search for a line [that] his hands and mind could internalize and confidently repeat, reveals that he was not working from the model, from life, from women’s bodies. He was working conceptually, from the museum of long and culturally diverse histories of art.”(G. Pollock, “Modigliani and the Bodies of Art Carnality, Attentiveness and the Modernist a Struggle”, Modigliani Beyond the Myth, (exhibition catalogue), New York, 2004, p. 70)
Modigliani’s egalitarian approach drew less from a desire of appropriation, but rather constitutes an exploration of “otherness” from the position of an artist who, as a culturally displaced, Italian Spehardic Jew in anti-semitic Paris on the eve of World War I, also held a position of “other”. As Mason Klein notes, these drawings reveal “the incipient artist himself, enmeshed in his own particular identity quandary, struggling to discover what portraiture might mean in a modern world of racial complexity” (M. Klein, ‘Unmasking Modigliani’ in Modigliani Unmasked, (exhibition catalogue)The Jewish Museum, New York, 2017, p.11).
The face in the present work is set in full-frontal and shallow profile. The removal of recessive space reflects the work of Picasso and the Cubist movement which surrounded Modigliani in Paris. Drawn with architectural precision, the geometric and stylised forms from this series convey the assertion that the identity of the subject is the construct of artistic representation. In Tête de face avec collier Modigliani employs a strong graphic line that conveys the draftsman’s presence. Although distinctly lineal, this force of pigment and use of space construct a sense of volume and plasticity that solidifies the head, a physical monument transposed onto paper. This is further informed by the subtle pentimenti on the paper, which, almost etched into the sheet, reveal the highly conscious placement of each architectural shape, the depth of line from the crayon almost rendering the sheet a three-dimensional object beneath the sculptor’s hand. Indeed, these effortlessly expressive and mesmeric drawings led to some of the most coveted modern sculptures today, venerable idols of the avant-garde (see fig. 1).
Tête de face avec collier was first acquired from the artist by Paul Alexandre, a pivotal figure in the artist’s life. Alexandre met Modigliani in 1907 and invited the young artist to join his circle of students and artists. He would become one of Modigliani's first and most significant patrons and formed the most important collection of the artist's drawings. As Alexandre once stated, “I was immediately struck by his extraordinary talent and I wanted to do something for him. I purchased drawings and paintings from him, but I was his sole purchaser and I wasn’t rich. I introduced him to my family. He already had the certainty of his own value rooted inside him. He knew that he was an initiator, not an imitator, but he had no commissions. I asked him to paint the portraits of my father, my brother Jean and several portraits of myself” (quoted in N. Alexandre, The Unknown Modigliani, op cit., p. 59).
From the Collection of Paul Alexandre
