It’s said that the veil between this life and the afterlife wears thin at this time of year. We can glimpse beloved ghosts and communicate with them once again. This post is dedicated to a couple of ghosts I’ve been following around for awhile — Jeanne Hébuterne and Amedeo Modigliani.
It also coincides with some incredible news I learned yesterday — Loving Modigliani: The Afterlife of Jeanne Hebuterne has just won the Historical Fiction category of the 2024 INDIE AUTHOR PROJECT AWARDS, a wonderful initiative partnering with Biblioboard, Library Journal, Ingram, and others to bring small press & indie books to public libraries across the country. I am deeply honored, grateful, and delighted that my novel has been included in this platform. And many thanks to my patient publisher - Walter Cummins at Serving House Books who made this possible. Here’s some background to the book - along with a reading from the first chapter in the embedded audio. Thanks for listening!
Paris, 1918 --An elusive figure inhabits the sundrenched rooms of modernist painter Amedeo Modigliani's Montparnasse studio in Rue de la Grande Chaumière. She sits quietly in a corner, sketching; paces the corridor with a heavy step; waits at the window, looking down at skeletal trees in an empty courtyard. From Modigliani's many portraits of her, we recognize her otherworldly gaze, her coppery hair coiled like a geisha's, her unflattering hint of double chin. It is Jeanne Hebuterne, Modigliani's companion, model, and muse.
Until October 2000, when her artwork was featured in a major exhibition in Venice at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, not much was known about Jeanne Hebuterne, except for the tragic story of her suicide in 1920. She was a promising young artist, fourteen years Modigliani's junior. Much too early in their love affair, Jeanne became pregnant with their first child. She was approaching the end of her second pregnancy when, destitute, abandoned by all but Jeanne, Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis on January 24, 1920. Unwilling to face life without him, she fell backwards out a Paris window less than forty-eight hours later, and at the age of twenty-one exited a world she had but little known. The couple was survived by their daughter, Jeanne Modigliani.
In Venice, by chance I stumbled upon the exhibition featuring Modigliani’s circle of friends and associates. There I discovered Jeanne’s carnet of drawings, which the Hébuterne family had agreed to exhibit for the first time in eighty years. Until that time, her artwork had been locked away in the studio of her brother André Hebuterne. (The reasons why they were hidden from public view is another story…)
The drawings in Jeanne’s carnet, mainly portraits, interiors, and nudes, reveal the complex web of relationships unfolding in Jeanne’s daily life. There are sketches of her father, mother, and their home; others of Modigliani, their studio, cafes, and lastly, poignant portraits of Modigliani on his death bed. There are also several eye-popping nude self-portraits, which are particularly striking if we consider that just a decade earlier, women were prohibited from drawing nude models in French art academies. Modigliani never painted Jeanne nude, perhaps, it has been claimed, as it was “not the Italian way” to paint one’s wife disrobed. But Jeanne had no qualms about celebrating her own body by drawing it. After seeing this show, I became fascinated with Jeanne’s story. I had an opportunity to meet and interview the curator who had worked closely with Modigliani’s daughter to have Jeanne’s works exhibited. For years I read, researched, and dreamed about Jeanne -and wrote an essay: Missing Person in Montparnasse: The Case of Jeanne Hébuterne, first published in the Literary Review which was nominated for a Pushcart prize. Some years later, I began working on some fiction fragments which soon welded together as my novel: Loving Modigliani: The Afterlife of Jeanne Hebuterne structured on three timelines.
Jeanne’s drawings tease us with the riddle of her identity – how could she be all these things all at once: a dutiful daughter and sister, a voluptuous lover, a reckless rebel, a modest schoolgirl, muse and model to one of the greatest painters of her era, defiant artist of proudly provocative nudes? Over a century, myths have sedimented around Jeanne Hébuterne like layers of mother-of-pearl. Was she a self-effacing victim or a woman with a mind of her own?
In writing this novel, I didn’t want to focus on her suicide – but on how she has continued to live through time – through her love for Modigliani, through her artwork, and through an ever-growing, global fascination for her. I also believe that the sad ending of their earthly lives did not cancel out the joy that Jeanne and Modi experienced as lovers and as artists in a unique moment in Paris. So I began my novel with the ending, as it were, and I have Jeanne tell her tale as a ghost. Loving Modigliani is a work of historical fantasy –which recreates a Paris of the underworld, through which Jeanne must journey to find her lover again. And she will. Kirkus said of this book: The book’s inventive afterlife is as vividly drawn as the streets of Paris. Brilliantly researched, imaginative cross-genre historical fiction.
Loving Modigliani: the Afterlife of Jeanne Hebuterne: a love story, a ghost story, a hunt for a missing masterpiece.
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