Modigliani

Looking at those nudes, The paintings done between 1917 and 1919. He knew he was dying, that he had successfully killed himself. Look at the sketches, that precede the paintings. The delicacy of line, replaced, in the paintings, by blocks of color; we lose the intimnacy of detail but we gain intensity. My favorite is "Tall Nude, Lying" at MOMA, that torso so elongated. And the way his nudes open out to you, nothing hidden. They're amazing. The way they invite you in. Most art excludes you, but Modigliani, his models, invite you into their world. I know you're looking at me and I don't give a damn. I understand the sexual subtext, it matters less to me than it would to someone younger, but I recognize the strength of it in the nudes. He arrived in Paris the year Cezanne died, saw the retrospective exhibit at the Salon d'Automne the following year, dealt with Cezanne's dictum "the richer the colors, the more solid the forms" for the rest of his life. Short as it was. All of the oil nudes were done between 1917 and 1919, he died in 1920 (the year my father was born) at 36. There's a calendar at the museum, from the Met, an object or painting a day, tomorrow is another Amedeo (Medi, his friends called him, which is probably a pun but I don't know Italian), a portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne. She's posed in an odd chair, in the corner of a room, her head tilted, her left index finger impossibly bent against her cheek. I love this calendar, when I have an idle moment, I sometimes look a day or two ahead, to see what's coming, then get to the museum early, so I can read about whatever it is in the museum library. So this morning I was looking at nudes with my breakfast coffee. Excellent way to start the day. Pegi, TR and Sara came in, and we talked in the common room, over coffee, a kind of jazzed funny conversation that went on for quite a while. TR and I lunched at the pub, from the new menu, the open face beef sandwich with gravy, mashed potatoes and green beans. I could stand to gain a few pounds, I've lost weight since this time last year and I wasn't heavy enough then. Two of my favorite words came up today, squalene, which is that oil produced on the side of your nose and in shark liver, which I knew was the lubricant of choice for watch makers, and synecdoche, which many people have trouble saying. Yarsagumba is a rare fungus from the Himalayas that actually grows on the corpses of a certain caperpillar and is worth thousands of dollars per kilogram, it may actually be an aphrodisiac, viagra came from somewhere, and a dozen people were sentenced to twenty years for beating to death 7 people for picking their mushrooms. The last part of the afternoon we talk about Steam Punk. Corsets and boots? Come on.