Art columnist Nadia Hsu PO ’27 visits Amedeo Modigliani’s “Portrait of a Woman (Beatrice Hastings?) in a Cloche Hat.” (Eliza Smith • The Student Life)
I like looking at sketches and imagining the moment they were drawn. Sketches feel intimate. Knowing that a drawing could’ve only been produced in a short period takes away some of art’s illusion, the barrier between the moment of inception and the moment that I am looking at the drawing.
Amedeo Modigliani’s “Portrait of a Woman (Beatrice Hastings?) in a Cloche Hat” is made up of expressive lines. The 1915 graphite drawing is part of the Benton Museum’s current exhibit “500 Years of Italian Drawings.”
Most of the external lines that outline the figure are heavier — I see Modigliani’s hand pressing down into the paper. The longer I look at the portrait, the more a person seems to come out of this assemblage of lines.
The first line I notice is the one that forms the right side of the woman’s neck. It is single, unbroken and starts at the jaw, outlining with a tiny mark where the jaw breaks away from the neck before moving slowly down through the neck and almost to the shoulder. This neck is ridiculously long — its line crosses most of the vertical page. The heaviness of the line foregrounds the figure, implying that she exists in a space that recedes behind her. As it continues down the page, the line tilts into a soft angle, making the twist of the head that turns away from us and hangs down languidly.
The heavy line of the neck exaggerates how delicately the face is drawn. Its features and the left side of its cheek and neck, are all made in such thin, light lines that the face threatens to sink into the white of the paper. The jaw is almost entirely omitted, leaving a very big expanse of blank paper down through the collar. Modigliani often left his subjects’ eyes empty — here, the eyes are barely there, only a few marks and without eyelids or pupils.
This is the barest indication of a face. All features are annihilated to a few pencil marks. On the gallery wall, most of the drawings that surround “Portrait of a Woman” are significantly more finished-looking and dramatic, making Modigliani’s portrait seem even more delicate in contrast. The exhibit’s galleries are kept in low light, the portrait hiding in a dark corner; its face, mostly white paper, stares ahead ghost-like.
The appeal of portraiture is often to look at a face and see the person behind it — the soul or mind or whatever else a person is beyond their body. A face becomes a control board for the self. The eyes, which cry and see, signal emotion and perception; the mouth, which speaks, signals self-expression; the ears, nose, etc.
“Most of the external lines that outline the figure are heavier — I see Modigliani’s hand pressing down into the paper. The longer I look at the portrait, the more a person seems to come out of this assemblage of lines.”
Modigliani’s “Portrait of a Woman” is only just enough of a face to signal the self — but still, this feels like a person to me. The tilt of the head and slight smile seem lifelike, as if the woman has stepped back to look at us. In its spare lines and abstracted simplicity, I am tempted to say that Modigliani’s portrait feels like a truer representation of a person than realism would be. If I were someone else, I might say it “captures the essence” of its subject.
This tilt of the head makes her seem hesitant, as if she has only in this moment decided to turn her face forward and let us look at her. The soft lines of the left outline of the face give the impression that she is receding slowly backward, fading away out of our view. Portraiture wants to steal the face of its subject; the artist and viewer both want to take the face of a person and keep it trapped here. Myself included. Modigliani has taken her eyes!
We want portraiture to signal the self — at least, I do. I want to look at “Portrait of a Woman” and feel like I understand this woman, like I am seeing through the paper into her head, seeing the lines as more than just lines. But, of course, it’s a half-lie: We only see the version of this woman that has been metered out for us, the lines she’s composed of intentionally elongated or thickened, her eyes given pupils or not given pupils.
Nadia Hsu PO ’27 is from Austin, Texas. She is chalant.