Modigliani

While there's no question that we're living through a period (a wave, really) of readable non-fiction, there is an increasing question, I think, about whether these works - about artists, about history, about regions of the world - are worthy of our attention.

Having recently completed Jeffrey Myers's biography of Amedeo Modigliani, I am again convinced that we are too generous in our praise, too eager to provide a positive review.

Myers's work is case in point: not only is the book poorly written, it's compiled in a way that - frankly - feels like a Google search. It's like each time Myers turns to a topic - Modigliani's Judaism, for instance, or his friendship with other artists - he throws at his readership everything he can find: a Kafka quote here, a passage from Apollinaire there. The result is a huge influx of information without any shape, without any meaning. (So what if Kafka wrote about his Bar Mitzvah? What does this have to do with Modigliani?)

This, though, isn't the worst part: for even though Myers does, from time to time, introduce an interesting argument or a helpful reference to the cultural history of Paris, he refuses - and I mean steadfastly refuses - to fully engage the meaning of Modigliani's life and work. It seems that Myers is more interested in describing 'what' than he is answering 'why.' The result is a flat, predictable biography which fails to account for those blank eyes (those endlessly fascinating blank eyes) of Modigliani's models. Here's a book with a superabundance of adjectives and decisive lack of verbs.

I know it's fashionable to castigate academic histories and biographies as being too bogged down in the details, in the minutia - but let me say that I'd take an academic treatment of Modigliani any day of the week. True, the footnotes can be cumbersome: but at least their presence suggests a clear line of argument, an attempt (whether successful or otherwise) to locate Modigliani within a larger continuum of artists, art, and art history.