The Artist and Ineffable Desire

This review was originally published September 28, 2020 in Italian at Carte Sensibli.
Translation with the aid of Google Translate.

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Amedeo Modigliani, an artist who left an indelible mark on 20th-century art for his ability to express sensual beauty with strength and intensity and ancient essence.

Carmelo Militano is a Canadian poet of Italian origin who I was lucky enough to meet in Cesena in 2018 at the Festival of the Sisters Arts and is the author of several books of poetry and prose. He is also someone who has never forgotten his roots and love for his Italian homeland and now has written an extraordinary poetic biography on the short intense life of Modigliani, a book that attempts to capture the great creative genius of Modigliani. Militano’s Catching Desire (Ekstasis Editions, 2020) is a new and original image of the flawed great artist.

Carmelo Militano is a poet and as such he has been able to enter emphatically into the deepest dimensions of Modigliani's life, expressing his preoccupations and longings, sensations, and emotions. This book could be defined as a kind of psycho-biography that equally focuses on the cultural and social milieu Modì came from as well as his artistic environment, and some hidden aspects of his family genealogy: the artist, for example, belonged to a rich multilingual Jewish family that suffered a financial crack; his parents (in particular Modigliani’s mother Eugenia) were cosmopolitan atheists and lovers of culture. Or we learn that in the early 20th century Modigliani moved to Venice to study at the Academy, but soon abandoned his studies, allowing himself to be absorbed into the city’s decadent sensual underbelly and the unparalleled light of Venice reflected on its the water.

Militano is poet who writes about Modigliani lyrically and is able to investigate his creative essence and seeks to understand its most intimate sources. Carmelo Militano is not limited to a simple biographical reconstruction, but also investigates the stars that influence his birth theme. Modigliani was born under the sign of the Virgin, dominated by Mercury, for the Greeks, Hermes, the psychopomp. In the Kabbala, the sign is connected with the sephiroth Hod, which presides over the sphere of mental faculties and which promotes imagination, intelligence and artistic abilities. 

It turns out that Amedeo Modigliani was not only a painter and strong believer in astrology but also loved the word- philosophy- and in particular poetry: he used to proclaim drunk in the cafes and saloons of Paris the verses of Villon, Baudelaire and Lautremont.

In order to understand Modigliani in depth, Carmelo Militano sets out to retrace or find traces of Modigliani by visiting Modi’s hometown Livorno. Militano offers us intense and vivid images of Livorno, and sometimes lonely images similar to the American artist Hopper of getting lost in the maze of streets, but still finding epiphanic moments. 

In addition to the deep and sensual bond Modi establishes with each city in which he lives( Livorno Capri, Rome, Venice, and Paris), there is also his tormented and often ambivalent relationship with the feminine: his loves were never trivial or banal, but often permeated by a tragic and sometimes fatal violent tempers, such as the one with the poet Beatrice Hastings or gentle and kind with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, or his fatal relationship with the young artist Jeanne Hébuterne who committed suicide two days after his death almost nine months pregnant.  

In the artistic field as in love, Modigliani appears to be a two-faced being, much like the ancient Roman god Janus: on the one hand he seeks success and recognition, on the other he is dominated by self-destructive tendencies.

Yet, this book also manages to go beyond the romantic clichés associated with artistic genius such as wild unruly behavior and  the stereotype of the maudit, (damned) artist because it not only manages to grasp the dark side of artistic creation, but Militano also finds the brighter, and  let us say, more positive side of the artist. Modigliani's kindness and refined mind, his creative sensibility and work ethic, his total disinterest in the economic aspect of his work, all make him adamantine and allow him to reject the contradictions in his life and the expectations of society. Modigliani was thus able to express in his works a maximum sensuality, rejecting the anxiety and anxieties of a Europe slowly entered into the upheavals (WW1) at the beginning of the 20th century.

The writing of Carmelo Militano is compelling, and alternates between prose and poetry. This variety of extraordinary interpenetration of styles and narrative allows him to effectively register the development of the pictorial and existential poetics of Modigliani. These pages are also pervaded by subtle ironic considerations such as the quote by the English writer Martin Amis in The Information: "Poets don't drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel. If he can drive, distrust the poetry." "Poets don't drive. Never trust a poet behind the wheel. If he can drive, be wary of his poetry." 

I do not know if Carmelo Militano can drive, but he certainly was able to conduct this book poetically and masterfully, offering a vivid and multifaceted image of Amedeo Modigliani's life and artistic expression.

Lucia Guidorizzi is the author of ten books of Italian poetry and is a professor at a Liceo Classico, City of Venice.