Woman with a Fan, by Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) was an Italian sculptor and painter who lived in Paris for much of his working life and always struggled to earn a living. He died young, as the result of over-indulgence in drink and drugs. 

During the last five years of his life he abandoned sculpture for painting, partly because he could not afford the raw materials but also because the outbreak of the First World War led to a dearth of commissions. For a man in poor health, painting portraits was also less arduous.

His portraits were mainly of women, and “Woman with a Fan” (“La femme a l'eventail”), painted in  1919, is a good example of his highly distinctive style. All the women he portrayed share certain characteristics, but they can also be recognised as individuals. He portrayed the woman he saw before him, but he also expressed a concept of womanhood that went beyond the subject in the studio.

The “Woman with a Fan” is a Polish woman named Lunia Czechowska, whom Modigliani painted several times. She was a friend of Leopold Zborowski, a poet turned art dealer, who took Modigliani and several other struggling artists under his wing and did his best to promote and sell their work. Modigliani was able to use Zborowski’s house as his studio, and Lunia was a willing and available model. 

The typical features of a Modigliani woman are an oval-shaped head on a long neck on top of sloping shoulders. The eyes are narrow and almond-shaped with no discernable features, such that they remind one of the blank eyes of ancient statues. The nose is long and splayed out at the end, as one might see on an African statue. The mouth is small and pinched.

The references to statuary are not accidental, because a painter and a sculptor were combined in the one artist. It was the shape of the image that interested Modigliani more than the detail, and the impression is of the sketch that a sculptor might make prior to getting to work with a block of stone and a chisel. 

In this case, the shape of the woman is an almost perfect oval, the line of the shoulders continued outward to the hips and then returning inwards to the crossed legs. The left arm rests on a knee and the right arm, the hand of which holds the fan, scarcely breaks the line. Lunia wears a yellow dress that complements the tones of her skin and forms a stark contrast with the deep red and brown of the wall and cabinet behind her. 

As with all great art, this portrait can be seen on several levels, all relating to how the artist viewed womankind. A Freudian view would be that the oval shape suggests a vagina, such that the woman is seen as a purely sexual object. We know that Modligliani did not treat the women in his life well, there being stories of violence shown to them; one was thrown out of a window, another dragged by her wrist along the street. When drunk, which was often, the artist was capable of anything in his attitude to women, and he would sometimes paint with a brush in one hand and a bottle in the other.

However, Modigliani could also exhibit great tenderness, and that is evident in this picture as well. Despite the stylized nature of his portrayal, there is a certain wistfulness in the sitter’s expression, and she does not come across as having a remote or unsympathetic character. We know that Modigliani and Lunia got on well as painter and model, in an atmosphere of mutual respect, and he treated her better in many respects than he did his own common-law wife. However, there is no suggestion that their relationship was anything other than a professional one. 

Amedeo Modigliani’s life was short and rarely happy. He brought misfortune on himself with his dissolute habits, and unhappiness and even tragedy to those close to him; after his death from tubercular meningitis at the age of 35, his heavily pregnant wife Jeanne committed suicide only two days later. But despite all this, Modigliani’s legacy is a highly individual style that has a beauty of its own. “Woman with a Fan” is only one of a number of his works that have brought him a well-deserved posthumous fame.

“Woman with a Fan” is one of five celebrated works that were stolen from the Museum of Modern Art in Paris on 19^th May 2010. It appears – as a “stolen painting” – in the 2012 Bond film Skyfall.

© John Welford