Influenced perhaps by the exaggerated tribal facades of Picasso's nudes completed ten years earlier (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in particular), Modigliani's first series of six paintings of nude women (completed in 1916 when the artist was thirty-two) express an odd combination of langor and disjointedness. When compared to the poignant realism of the second series done the following year, mark them as not only challenging and experimental, but self-conscious about their debt to both primitivism and classicism (fig. 1).

Barely a year later these dissident influences have been poetically resolved in favor of an unabashed sensuality (these are no longer masques, they are "real" naked women) heightened by an enveloping purity rarely evident in Western Art since the Renaissance. This is particularly obvious in the seated or standing nudes of 1917 and is fully exemplified by Nu assis au collier. Modigliani painted this unknown model three times, the other two works show her reclining, one wearing the same necklace but with open eyes (fig. 2) and one with closed eyes and hands behind her head (fig. 3).

Nu assis au collier is the epitome of sanctified eroticism, only the halo is missing. Our "virgin" is flush-cheeked with eyes downcast in piety and her pose suggests the demur modesty of Botticelli's Venus. Lurking, however, not beneath, but well within the surface and contours of her body is a plump bewitching sensuality that surely out-distances the most provocative of Renoir's late nudes with which we know Modigliani was well acquainted. Her left hand at her throat caresses what? A token of her lover's gratification or a simple ornament as pure as a rosary. Likewise her right hand. Does it lie modestly to conceal her sex or pruriently to point the way?

For decades critics have debated the degree to which Modigliani painted nudes qua nudes or nudes qua eroticism and of course it is finally left up to the viewer. This work embodies the totality of his vision as an artist in every respect: the rich dark background of black and chocolate brown which throws her illuminated body into strong relief; the three vertical lines in the background (five if we count the edges of the canvas itself) which favor her elongation even though her hips spread abundantly in the horizontal and the soft plump white fabric on which she is perched, rendered in an impasto as rich as that of her thick chestnut hair. Her face, too, is perfection, the features drawn with a few strong swift strokes of great clarity and balance, the contours gently modelled to give depth to the refinement of the almost perfect oval.

'We demand, for a period of ten years, the total suppression of the nude in painting.' No one more firmly resisted the Futurists' demand than did Amedeo Modigliani: so much so, that for many people the name of Modigliani is almost synonymous with his nudes. And yet these are not particularly numerous; the portraits far outnumber them. There is room for debate, too, as to the accuracy of the view, expressed by some commentators, that the nudes represent Modigliani's major artistic reasons--reasons that have become increasingly irrelevant over the succeeding decades, as society has become more 'permissive'.

The Futurists, for their part, had no moral objections; they disapproved of the female nude because it was the epitome of tradition in painting. Perhaps they never would have condemned it so apodictically if only Modigliani's nudes had already existed around 1910; entirely traditional though these were, they shocked the contemporary public so profoundly on moral grounds that the Futurists might well have considered them entirely in keeping with their own antibourgeois élan.

This, again, is a symptom of Modigliani's position between tradition and Modernism. No other painter, in our century or in any other, has painted the female human body as he did. And yet his nudes evoke involuntary associations of Classicism. They are a continuation of a great tradition of European painting, not only thematically but also in the 'spiritual' interpretation of the theme, insofar as they consitute a celebration of beauty, immaculateness and perfection, and thus an idealization of physical Nature--which, in these pictures, dispenses with an idealized visual context and may thus be understood as a contribution to the freeing of sex from moralistic intrusions. The nudes are wholly liberated, even if the artist himself had no thought of making a liberating gesture.

Modigliani's nudes take their place among the historical landmarks of the art of the nude since the Renaissance: works such as the Venuses of Giorgione, Titian and Tintoretto; Francesco Goya's Maja desnuda; Ingres' Grande Odalisque; Edouard Manet's Olympia (fig. 4); and also if you like, certain paintings by Gauguin. It is tempting to draw comparisons between Modigliani's nudes and all of these, but such comparisons are no more meaningful than the effort to relate Modigliani's portraits to historic works of art on the grounds of a vague sense of kinship. Such juxtapositions lead only to one conclusion, a fairly obvious one; that Modigliani's nudes are nudes and nothing but. No mythology, no landscape, no draperies, no social relevance, no coquetry; just bare facts. In a genre that spans the whole of art history, right down to the salon painting of the nineteenth century, and in a vein that might well have been exhausted by Modigliani's day, this is a unique achievement. It remains so even though the center of gravity of Modigliani's art really lies in the portraits, and above all in those of the period between 1914 and 1916, at the end of which the superb sequence of nudes begins.

There was no idealogy at work here, neither a Rousseau-esque 'Back to Nature' impulse--such as moved the contemporary Expressionist painters to paint people naked in the freedom of Nature--nor critique of bourgeois morality. There is no escapism and no rebellion, in Modigliani's nudes. What singles them out is their self-evidence: the self-evidence of the naked body, from which nothing could be more remote than any idea of cast-off clothing or a cast-off morality. They do not urge us to strive for the freedom that they possess.

Perhaps that is why they were considered so immoral: the fact that morality has no part in them, not even in the guise of immorality--flirtatious glances, or the like. Well might the total absence of pudeur or sexual shame be considered shameless, and--in this innocent sense--it is not wrong to call them amoral. (There is, even so a kind of pudeur in the fact that the artist never painted his own girlfriends naked but used only 'anonymous' models.) It was surely Modigliani's freedom from shame that incensed the contemporary guardians of morality and led in one case to the closing of an exhibition by the police. Voyeuristic allusions were entirely accepted in painting, and had indeed been part of the mainstream tradition of the nude ever since Titian; in fact, the undressed state was more readily accepted than 'honest' nudity. There was a failure to perceive that it was just because Modigliani's nudes do not engage in erotic games, even with a fan or a mirror, that they were fundamentally 'moral'. They unveiled nothing, because nothing remained veiled, whether by mythology or by anecdote, or even by an 'accidentally' placed scrap of cloth. The moral indignation that these paintings unleashed was the result of their total openness, of their extreme reduction of the woman's body to itself, and of the straightforwardness with which Modigliani related to his subject. (W. Schmalenbach, op. cit, pp. 47-48)
fig. 1 Amedeo Modigliani, Nu au divan (Almaisa), 1916, Mr. and Mrs. Paul D. Wurzburger, Cleveland Léopold Zborowski (fig. 5) who, like the artist was himself far from wealthy. He became Modigliani's first dealer and championed his cause after the artist's untimely death at the age of thirty-six.

fig. 1 Amedeo Modigliani, Nu au divan (Almaisa), 1916, Mr. and Mrs. Paul D. Wurzburger, Cleveland

fig. 2 Amedeo Modigliani, Nu au collier, 1917, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

fig. 3 Amedeo Modigliani, Nu couché au collier, 1917, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin

fig. 4 Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

fig. 5 Amedeo Modigliani, Léopold Zborowski assis, 1919, Museo de Bellas Artes, Sa Paolo