Carlo Valentini, "Elvira la modella di Modigliani"

“Death overtook him when he came to glory”

Being portrayed by Modì, it was used to say in the milieu, was like “having your soul undressed”. The setting is that of Montmatre and Montparnasse, the portrait in particular stands out on the cover of Carlo Valentini’s book: “Elvira the model of Modigliani.”

The figure absorbs and occupies all the space, it has an unlimited composure, a slightly asymmetrical presence; her features are reminiscent of African masks, her very feminine body has, however, a masculine solidity, the oval of her face is refined, her mouth is sweet, her expression is aware and melancholy. It is Elvira la Quique, whose story Valentini tells us in a fictionalized biography, halfway between narration and essay.

The author re-evaluates and highlights this figure, overshadowed by Modì’s last companion, the meek Jeanne Hebuterne, famous for her tragic end. The two women are different, the portraits that represent them are different. Sweet, naive, that of Jeanne, disturbing and, at the same time, full of feeling, melancholy and understanding, that of Elvira.

La Quique is the daughter of a prostitute, in Paris she ends up doing her mother’s job as well as singing. She has a disturbing body, dark hair and eyes. She immediately enters the ambience of the models, who, naked and shameless, pose for the painters of Montmatre and Montparnasse.

From man to man, she is in Amedeo’s arms. She will love him all her life, between quarrels and reconciliation, between betrayals and sorrows.

If Jeanne will be the companion of the soul, the mother of his children, the electively similar, Elvira, Valentini tells us, is something more, she is the one who — despite the difference in sensitivity, culture and intent — more than any other shared with Modì the lifestyle, the need to “be and do”, the elan vital.

“Elvira endured, paid this price to keep a man who treated her like a real woman, understood her, shared journeys in the ghosts of the hallucination, portrayed her on paper or on canvas, snatching her inner life away from her with passionate and carnal poses and a certain animal sensualism that masked her painful fragility. For Elvira it was like looking in the mirror, happy and proud of contemplating herself and being able to be contemplated, a female who dreams and makes us dream.”

Elvira and Amedeo live a life more of hardship than bohemian, but they do not spare themselves. They love each other, they challenge each other, they bite into all the pleasures of flesh, art and life, including absinthe, hashish and cocaine (of which Elvira will enslave herself until she falls ill and loses her voice). Like the other models, she is always naked, ready to pose but also to make love, as if the two things coincide, they naturally flow into each other. The brushstrokes are tongues ​​that search for each other, the colors are moods that merge, that run on the canvas. Valentini’s novel exudes carnality, drawn precisely from the paintings, from heavy breasts, from luxuriant triangles, exhibited without malice, with the sense of something serenely necessary.

The dialogues are affected and, together, benefit from being the result of archival research on unpublished documents. The protagonists speak directly, their artificial way of expressing themselves does not however ring false in this avant-garde background, where Picasso and Utrillo work, where painters passionate about art and drugs move, together with slim and sensual models, capable of sharing aspirations and transgressions, constraints and delusions of grandeur. A dissolute and absolute environment, a melting pot of culture, of artistic experimentation. Amedeo paints like noone. Amedeo uses African and mellow colors, pink lights, where black strokes flash. He loves his women and doesn’t really bond with anyone, except maybe Jeanne when he feels the end coming.

But the magic of the book lies, above all, in the re-enactment of the milieu. Montparnasse with its sordid alleys, the thin-walled Bateau-Lavoir, where quarrels and lovemaking are in the public domain, where one suffers cold in winter and hot in summer. We see the squalid hovels with unmade beds, the floors strewn with empty bottles, the sheets stained with sardine oil.

Amedeo paints with fury, aware of the imminent end, of the glory that will come only posthumously; he coughs, his hand trembles, his brain is inflamed, his companions get confused in his mind: the refined Anna becomes the combative Beatrice, the Jeanne of a good family changes into Elvira the entreneuse, the one who loves, who follows from afar, who waits and who suffers.

It will be all these people who will accompany Modigliani on his last journey, when the carriage will parade through the streets of Paris, followed by a long procession of painters, models, with the artists of Montmatre and Montparnasse gathered.

And, after all the vicissitudes, after the fragile Jeanne throws herself out of the window with the creature she carries in her womb, it will once again be Elvira — limp, numb, survivor of prison and a death sentence — to place on the grave of the unfortunate girl, as a seal of a lifetime, the last bouquet of flowers, the one that Amedeo can no longer give to his partner.