Modigliani Paintings — Portraits: The Introspective Mask
By: Brie Hayashi
Tags: Art History, Painting, Fine Art, Identity, Art

How Modigliani’s ‘mask-like’ portraits show his introspection on identity.

When it comes to modern art history Modigliani’s portraits are of particular interest. Making up a majority of the Italian artist’s body of work, the portraits are curiously unconstrained to a single style. Mask-like and sculptural they feature long faces with slit eyes and small mouths.

Diving deeper into one particular work of his, the Portrait of Paul Guillaume (1916), we can analyze the stylistic features of this painting and see how Modigliani, through a multidisciplinary approach, depicts the mutability of identity in these ‘mask-like’ portraits.

“When I know your soul, I will paint your eyes.” — Modigliani

Stylistic Analysis of Modigliani’s “Portrait of Paul Guillaume” (1916)

The Portrait of Paul Guillaume by Amedeo Modigliani (1916) is done in oil paints on canvas. The colors include toned down hues of rusts, browns, and blacks that are contrasted with white and light flesh tones.

Written on the left side of the painting in capital letters are the sitter’s name, Paul Guillaume, and the year during which the painting was produced.

The background is a corner where two walls of different shades of brown meet. These architectural details are formed only with the use of a few vertical lines broken up by short horizontal segments. The figure and the background merge into one plane providing the painting with a flat quality.

The delineated volume of the figure contradicts this planar emphasis. The subject is outlined by dark, linear brushstrokes. This forms a relief like effect that separates him from his surroundings and disrupts the levelled plane.

The subject, Paul Guillame, is placed at the center of the painting and occupies the entire space. He completely dominates the environment and almost seems to be crammed into his surroundings.

As Neal Benezra puts it in his “A Study in Irony: Modigliani’s “Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz”, Modigliani uses severe lines to depict the physical surroundings of the subject and these provide structure to the painting. The black lines defining the walls extend into the subject’s shoulders and neck leading down his sides and forming a linear grid of parallels. Horizontal lines forming the back of a chair, in the lower left, and moulding, in the right side of the painting, lie perpendicular to these verticals. This balanced composition encloses the subject and forms a compressed environment.

This controlled grid displays how the artist manipulated the sitter’s positioning in order to frame the subject. This framing articulates the singular human presence and forces the viewer to engage the subject of the portrait directly.

Paul Guillaume is shown sitting, quite relaxed, casually leaning against the back of the chair with one eyebrow slightly raised. He is dressed in the typical daywear of early 20th century bourgeois Parisians. He sports a dark suit with a white dress shirt, a brown, knotted tie, and a black hat.

One of his hands rests in his lap while the other is draped over the back of the chair. The tones Modigliani used to paint this hand directly contrast the black of the suit. The fingers are elongated and casually spread apart. His head is slightly tilted and enlarged. His slender body with slight, sloping shoulders further emphasizes this. Modigliani accentuates his square, pronounced jaw with a dramatic brushstroke going from the outer corner of his right eye to the bottom of his chin. These abstractions are all used to emulate the sitter’s distinctive personality.

Both ears are turned outward and are visible to the viewer contorting reality. He has a triangular nose with distended nostrils and a small, pink mouth beneath a neatly trimmed moustache. The eyes are mismatched and asymmetrical. They resemble eye slits in masks and are both are blank. One is painted solid white to match the subject’s shirt and the other is a dark, eerie green.

The white eye is beneath the arched eyebrow and is directed outwards. The green eye has eyelashes protruding from it and resembles a “spiky green hedgehog”. This eye is skewed inwards and draws the attention of the viewer because of its peculiar color.

The brushwork is evident and frantic. The artist’s movements can be clearly seen in the brushstrokes. The texture of the painting is reminiscent of chisel marks in a sculpture. There are dabs of paint that contrast the flat painted areas of the canvas. Some raw canvas is left in view in order to produce highlights. There is a raw presence established by the volumetric realism of the subject’s flesh. The subject’s slightly refracted and abstracted body and environment contradict this realistic presence. The definite lines dividing the work mark the differentiation of the simultaneous views of the subject and his background.

A Synthesis of 20th Century Art

The Portrait of Paul Guillame (1916) cannot be restricted to simply one stylistic category. Modigliani as an artist refused to sign manifestos and did not declare himself a part of any artistic movements of his time. His art defies categorization because of its radical stylization and combination of several categories. Modigliani’s style is a synthesis of several canonical styles, such as the Futurists, Cubists, Divisionists, and Macchiaioli, and his own developments.

Modigliani studied under the Macchiaioli master Giovanni Fattori and picked up the austere style of the Macchiaioli that is evident in his selection of colors. The raw, untreated canvas showing through in his painting is a result of his appreciation and contact with Matisse. He did after all live in Montparnasse, a melting pot of artistic talent in Paris during the early 1900s, and thus came in contact with a large number of artists and styles that influenced him.

His close friendship with Picasso also affected his art with formal distortions and refraction that was prevalent in Cubist studies as well as a focus on the expression of precise volumes. In Portrait of Paul Guillame this influence is evident in the subject’s disjointed yet realistic figure. Modigliani, like Picasso, was also highly influenced by African and Oceanic art. The masks and elongated forms from these are referenced in almost all of his pieces, including this one.

The Divisionistic brushwork adds further modern aspects to this painting. Modigliani’s connection to Severini and the Futurists is the source of these conspicuous, and frenetic strokes. It is these that produce the sense of living presence in Portrait of Paul Guillame. His exclusion from the Futurists was self imposed however. Severini even asked Modigliani to sign the Futurist manifesto, but he refused.

All of these influences on Modigliani’s creations render them Modern. He roamed the Avant-Garde circles of Paris during a time of copious artistic exploration but did not submit to one group. Instead, he chose which aspects of these stylistic categories served him best and employed them in his works.

Personality Behind the Portrait

Through his depictions Modigliani portrayed his subjects’ personalities in subtle, satirical ways. Each portrait exudes both the subject’s essence and the nature of Modigliani’s relationship with them. Paul Guillaume for example being his art dealer and someone he highly distrusted is depicted with his enlarged head, differing eyes and shifty pose.

The discomfort sensed in Paul Guillaume’s portrait can be directly contrasted with portraits of Jeanne Hebuterne, Modigliani’s wife and mother of his only child. She’s often depicted in warm tones and in gentle poses with curved lines.

Modigliani was contemporary with all of his stylistic attributes but never joined any movements or groups. Even within the world of modern art he was an outsider. His work was an exploration of synthesis not only in styles but also of identity.

Perhaps he intended his ‘mask-like’ visages to offer a universal depiction of what it means to be human. With each individual’s true distinctions coming from their personalities, and relationships rather than features.

“When I know your soul, I will paint your eyes.” — Modigliani

Perhaps in his work he sought to create not just a style where artists of any movement could belong but where any viewer could also envision the portraits’ sitter as a mirror of themselves.