Review: Modigliani, a Life–the author doesn’t get it. See the movie instead.
Modigliani: A Life, by Meryle Secrest
I often point out that motivations and lives of the subjects about whom biographers write can’t be understood without comprehending addiction. Modigliani provides yet more support for my assertion.
Secrest, who specializes in art-related biographies, thinks the artist Amedeo Modigliani’s public intoxication was mostly feigned and that he used drugs “medicinally,” as a “necessary anesthetic…to soothe his coughing fits” from his long-kept secret illness, tuberculosis. Yet, as described in Lance Esplund’s splendid review of the book in The Wall Street Journal, he insulted waiters, broke dishes and chairs, threw his mistress through a window and, when he was drunk, stripped nude in cafes and bars. He traded drawings for drinks and was a deadbeat dad who died friendless and alone.
Once addiction is understood, one needs very little information to ascribe high odds of the disease as the best explanation for misbehaviors and otherwise inexplicable attitudes. Any one of the behaviors alone gives high odds. The first line in the “product description” at Amazon.com is a quote suggestive of the classic arrogance of the addict: “People like us . . . have different rights, different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” The fact that this sounds like Charlie Sheen is no accident.
A far more accurate depiction of Modigliani is found in the 2005 movie by the same name, reviewed in the June 2005 TAR.