“Please,” she says in that clipped, confident accent of the British Empire, raising a perfectly fluted Burberry umbrella to the assembled flock of well-heeled, well-scented  tourists obscuring the Modigliani hanging in the arcaded pavilion of the Palazzo Venier Del Leoni.

“Let us be respectful of our neighbors in the museum, gather round.”

In my contrapposto stance, transfixed, I am captivated by this portrait found on my first day in Venice, at the inception of a five week journey, I am traveling alone, traveling to appease a hunger for art, for architecture, for the passionately stylish manner–il maniero stilizzato–by which the Italians live. Lodging at the Pensione Seguso, in a room overlooking the Canale della Giudecca, I have footed marble bridges arching narrow, stoned walkways that skirt weathered palazzos and flotillas of glistening crafts to reach the Collezione Peggy Guggenheim.

Adjusting her scarf with a flourish evocative of a Swiss finishing school, the guide urges her charges to “move beyond the romantic story, the myths surrounding Amedeo Modigliani, who until now, has been known as the handsome womanizer, consumed by alcohol and drugs, who died young, poor and relatively unknown, and is best known for being une peintre maudit—a cursed artist—not perceived as seriously avant-garde, but rather a figurative artist languishing sadly in cafés unrecognized, a characterization which is perpetuated despite information to the contrary. That in fact, during his lifetime Modigliani exhibited both in France and abroad, garnering significant interest from collectors, dealers, and critics. And, that for today’s eyes, which have seen Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and the many manifestations of Postmodernism, his art may seem tame, but through the eyes of his contemporaries, who did not consider his style naturalistic or realistic, one can come to appreciate its subtlety, its novelty—an art seen as literary, or imaginative, in which sitters are turned into ‘Modiglianis,’ capturing the daring wonder the art conveyed at the time it was made.”

“His portraits,” she continues, “chronicle the artists and writers of wartime Paris as he frequented the soirees of Gertrude Stein, his pockets flush with books, reciting the verses of Dante, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, and clothes, when he wore them—for he had a habit of stripping naked when drunk—set trends in his neighborhood; shod in laced, rough leather shoes, he might pair a pale green vest over a pearl gray jacket, a blue and white checkered shirt, a white satin tie, and a round black felt hat.”

Another guide impatiently flicks a bantam Italian flag, signaling his post in the gallery, tugs repeatedly at the stricture of his collar, and waits to advance the narrative of the artist for his group.

“Modigliani is adored by the public,” he says, “and holds a prominent place in the most prestigious private and museum collections. Despite the astronomic prices his works command in auction houses, he remains to dealers one of the most coveted. The artist of love, adept at forbidden pleasures, greater than his myth yet less lovable, less of a roué than we previously thought. The pioneer who opened the avenues of avant-garde experience that bore fruition in the work of other modern masters. An artist tormented by an absolute, perfectionist vision, who treated portraiture with something akin to clairvoyance, each portrait imprinting the inwardness of its sitter with a feverish strain of emotions taken to the extreme, the soul rendered on the canvas as a dissected, discarnate face—nature’s supreme creation—now restructured in primitive patterns, the anonymous features elongated, lax, impassive and grave, thought up in tangerines and violets; each a mask washed with the lament of the artist’s brief, restless life.”

His portraits—often dashed off at a café table—of sculptors and painters and poets, of art collectors and art dealers, and of all his lovers and, towards the end of his life, of simple, ordinary people like me—entrance in a way that borders on the vertiginous and I sink, helpless, to the floor, as bodies bustle by, words, to my lips, rushing to express the sentiment roused by this prince of Montparnasse, and I grasp for the first time, since my now deceased father interdicted art school, that I wished to have defied him, to have become the artist I had once imagined myself becoming.

 

“He’s not leaving this house with that box, Mrs. Eastman,” my father roared that fateful morning, a cup of black coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other. “Not no, but hell no.” 
“Who would like to make the Valentine’s Box this year?” Miss Gray had asked, just a week before.

“Me!” I had yelled, anxious to win the coveted task that normally, went to a girl.

“Mr. Eastman it is,” she said, after surveying the room, which had, compared to mine demonstrated an alarming lack of enthusiasm. “I’m sure he’ll bring all his artistic skills to bear.”

No one, I suspect, ever, in the history of Szetela Memorial Elementary School in Chicopee, Massachusetts located two-and-a half hours west of Boston, had mounted on a large cardboard box, a lifelike, two-foot-tall flamenco doll, whose arms, launched seductively above her head, held miniature castanets; a dark-skinned plastic woman with bun-knotted black hair buttressing a comb draping an extensive black lace veil, sheathed in a tight-waisted, carmine, ruffled  satin dress, at the bottom of which I had stapled a precise lake of red-and-black crepe paper flounces to extend the hem of her skirt and in the front of the box one fold of her fabricated skirt rose, flirtatiously, to reveal the disguised slot for the amorous missives. But better, I had wired the doll to the top of the box leaving enough leeway so that when moved, she shimmied on her makeshift stage.

“But Ellery, he worked for two solid weeks on the thing,” my mother, ever my advocate, suspecting my dismay, pleaded my case, her hands obstinately plunged in the pockets of her robe.

“I don’t care. No son of mine will be seen on my school bus with my driver carrying that catastrophic excuse for jollification!”

The word sent me to the dictionary, of course, and on the way I worried that my artistic calling had bypassed his comprehension. In the beginning, I was an artist, a lover to paper, crayons, colored pencils, to scissors and glue, to all that symbols, shapes, and shadings could represent. My first memories of painting involve classrooms swollen with the chatter of children; thick, caramel-colored brush handles with brown tails of stiff, cropped hair; tall paint jars planted in expectant apertures at the base of a towering easel; crisp white paper sheets torn with a rumble and a snap, from a colossal roll, then buckling with the wet of paint, drying to crinkles, and when bent, cracking with fissures; the weight of a blue, bulky smock, my tunic, as it slipped past my ears; my hands tattooed with the bleed of primary colors; the damp-sour smell of a stray daub of tempura on the tip of my nose as I chased time from the clock, a soul encamped, bending fantasy to reality, while sunflowers swayed in yellow and seas steeped in blue violet, violet blue and aquamarine, as skies begged for periwinkle, buildings for burnt sienna, leaves for celadon and rust, clouds silver, and lightning bolts, black.

Licorice black.

Here I found the first tiny startle of hope bestowed by the land of make-believe.

Specialty coloring book—the Atlas of Foreign Flags, a Pictorial History of the Five Continents, Hats and Cloaks through the Centuries, or Modern Costumes—filled quickly. When asked to describe my moods, I washed them in whispering, optimistic whites; gloomy, grumbling grays; trumpeting reds—mahogany, Indian, brick; or the incapacitating blues—cobalt, blueberry, Baltic Sea. Parked in front of televised beauty pageants, I called out the colors of the evening gowns—ice, ivory, champagne, caramel, and ecru. I wanted to paint my bedroom aubergine.

“You’re kidding,” my father said, “right?”

To the world of art, an arriviste, my father was not, having acquired the vocabulary of art through college correspondence courses in art history, and he had, thank you very much, seen Michelangelos in, thank you very much, situ and the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo and he had, thank you very much, purchased all the art that hung on a succession of living room walls but, with the artistic inclinations of his eldest son, the appreciation faltered.

Did he hear my gasp that Valentine morning when I overheard the fiat­ that my oeuvre—the masterpiece promised to a class of fourth-grade art patrons in whose applause I planned to bask—would never cross the threshold?

Did he not hear the plunk of hot tears on the wooden floor?

But, after he left for work, with my mother’s assurance and her assistance, I wrapped the tableau flamenco in a white sheet, hauled it on, and off, the bus, snuck it across the schoolyard and into the cloakroom where it stayed until after lunch when Mrs. Gray, my very best fan, gave the pre-arranged signal. Smiling, she looked ceiling-ward, then twice patted the lacquered nest atop her head and tucked in a few stray hairs.

I then paraded it like a religious float up and down the aisles, the jiggling canopy piquing my peers’ and fueling much speculation as to what lay beneath until, with a snap of my wrist, I unveiled it, and a hush settled on the room.

“Oh, it’s so beautiful,” cooed Mary Battista, who sat on my left and copied my test answers.

A surge of pride straightened my spine; I bent my head, placed one leg behind the other and prepared to bow.

“It’s a girl’s box,” booed Michael French, who sat on my right, and also copied my test answers.

Ignoring the latter and smiling at the former, I reassured myself that despite the roar of titters, it was the most fantastic Valentine’s Day Box, ever.

Then Michael French shouted, “What’s that smell?

“That’s enough, Mr. French,” said Mrs. Gray.

What he registered was the cloud of Chanel—generously-spritzed, lusciously-lingering—added, at the last minute to the voluminous crepe paper pannier, or skirt, as Mrs. Gray explained.

“Class, let’s thank Mr. Eastman, shall we, for his box?” Mrs. Gray implored.

Though the applause sounded mostly female, I took the bow, happy to have been, in their hour of need, of artistic service.

“Whose doll is that?” yelled Michael French.

“Enough, Mr. French,” said Mrs. Gray.

The box, epitomizing my skills with scissors and paper, dwarfed the clay-and-straw Pilgrim village in third grade and the wire-and-felt Presidential hand puppets in second, and appeared underappreciated by these gender-demarcated, working-class children—these rubes who ate anemically-pink baloney sandwiches layered with slices of incandescent-orange cheese on beige-crusted, dust-colored bread, wrapped in wax paper and pulled from luridly kaleidoscopic lunch boxes.

“Girl’s box,” Michael French hissed when he shoved his mail in, saying nothing of the red cashmere sweater I had pilfered from my mother’s bureau and slipped into just before the processional, along with, to match the color scheme, my jet-black, high-waisted, quite-tight flamenco pants.

Perhaps, by not allowing that box to sally forth, my father had been trying to protect me, and my precious instincts; protect me from being saddled with the same ridicule, ostracism, and shame he suffered, at the age, when, abandoned by his parents, he became a ward of the state, shuffled amongst foster homes, the object of derision for being different, until, at the age of sixteen, a grandmother signed him into the military and he began his campaign to conform and never stray from the norm.

My artful antics had been an antithesis to all that.

“My little artist,” he said after reading Mrs. Gray’s note congratulating him on having a son with such talent.

“And by the way, lose the sweater.”

“Yes, sir.”

 

In the sacrosanct space of making art I had lived often, for if school did not provide an art project, I would fabricate one for myself. At home, head bent over a shiny maple slant top desk, littered with ceramic cups of sharpened colored pencils ready to march across a pile of blank paper, I copied schoolbook illustrations—a flower’s organs; an apple’s core; or the human circulatory system—a muscled maroon heart ringed by a cage of white ribs, pumping fountains of cerise to the periphery, a nest of indigo veins in repose, waiting, to recoup the spent fluids; copying just to copy, to practice, to expend that robust tray of sharp-tipped pencils, their crisp shavings collapsing in curls to the floor, inert until swept with a squat-handled, wide-bristled brush into the diminutive dustpan kept for just that purpose.

With a hope that I could set up a portable studio whenever I left the house, in my family’s company, I carried a kit of materials.

“Spoony,” my father would explain to the other father of the house we were visiting; spoony, he said, as though with one word, a knowing grin, and a hunch of the shoulders, he could excuse his eldest son of proscribed social duties, and while I would shake hands and repeat polite greetings, I refused to run, romp, or cavort in a ballistic fashion on the front lawns—no ball batting, no bat swinging, no dangerous challenges to my extremities, or trunk, or face, in any way—pointing, instead at my school bag, stuffed with burgeoning obligations, and shrug.

“Mingle,” my father commanded. You’re not, Meekellaunjaylo, for chrissakes. Don’t be a bore.”

“But Dad,” I would complain, “it’s for school.”

That silenced him, a man who expected educational excellence, that the task was for school, mollified him as effectively as a cross can, reportedly, obstruct a vampire’s path.

“My little artist,” my mother would say, her tacit sigh my cue to ignore the other children and forgo their urgent needs to play.

During our family museum outings, I would be the last to leave a gallery, moony for the Monet, vanquished by a Velasquez, startledby a Cézanne.

Art unleashed my imagination, and I envisioned myself smocked, en beret, in a cosmopolitan atelier, facing a front of easels, an unfiltered cigarette drooped from my lip, my eyes asquint, dodging the smoke, the floor’s pile of ash marking the hours of my effort, of bringing light, and form, in a fresh, direct, and untutored approach.

“Five more minutes,” I would beg my parents, beseeching time to linger, as yet another painting-in-a-hand-carved-gilded-frame unbuckled the awe permitted me, the observer, when an artist marries his observations to an inner vision.

“Wrap it up, buddy boy,” my father would say, snapping open a fresh handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit to mop his art-soaked brow.

“We’ve got a castle and the zoological park after lunch.” In our world, moving amongst military installations, we dipped into whatever cultural magnificence abutted our lives. There had been the Great Mosque of Cordoba, the Alhambra Palace of Granada, the Prado in Madrid, and the Metropolitan in New York, each a mystical and magic pilgrimage, each nourishing thoughts of a life hinging on art: I would be like Modgiliani, painting with an unmatched concentration, with intuition and imagination, with unusual nobility, with grace, with elegance; endlessly tormented by a taste for danger, unafraid to risk life in order to expand it, prone to violent quarrels but of a gentle nature, despising mediocrity, rich with pretensions to royal privilege.

“An artist,” I would reply, when asked what I aspired to be. “A famous artist.”

My beaming mother would, signaling her excitement, twirl the rings on her left hand; my father, as though his highest hopes had been betrayed, winced.

“Why can’t he throw a ball for five minutes with other kids, goddammit?” he often bellowed from a barstool in the den when he returned from work.

“Ellery, he’s a gentle child,” she always argued. “Art is very, very important to him. It’s his life.”

“Jesus, Celia, when did I become a member of the booboisie? Of course culture is important, but does he have to spend all his time sharpening pencils, and scrooched over that damn drawing pad?”

“Booboisie?” my mother said. “Are you insulting me?”

“Look it up,” he yelled over the crackle of a fistful of ice tossed into a tumbler, followed the urgent whoosh of an angry arc of firewater, the cubes shivering, snapping and hissing, settling in before he, suavely, churned them and swallowed, in one sustained gulp, the cool elixir.

“Oh hell,” he said, slamming the glass on the bar, “it means uncultured.”

My father’s formidable verbal skills included this penchant for springing unusual words in the midst of a heated exchange, which, while we unearthed its meaning in the dictionary, defused the moment but, they also served to sum his reactions, in one, exalted word, to a work of art. Parked in front of a painting he would stare, pretentiously cupping a hand to his chin, then, with a grin, pronounce the interpretation.

“Risible,” he might say of a Renoir.

“Adroit,” of a Degas.

“Piercing,” of a Picasso.

My mother, speaking after my father, faltered. “How interesting,” or “That’s nice,” or “Like that one!” she might say, but ultimately, their primary purpose was to chauffeur me, and my enthusiasm, to the next altar of art. My vocabulary, flush with words extracted from the dictionary, and augmented by those richly-illustrated books I purchased in the museum gift shop, flourished. I now had language for art-inspired feelings. By eleven, my precociousness and deep-rooted confidence in my own worth led my parents to purchase me private art classes with a Spanish portraitist of some renown amongst the wives of the Officer’s Club who graciously circulated his name.

Señor de la Cruz y Vicente painted the American families against contrived and lavish local scenes of the city of Seville, the lady as grande dame—a tortoiseshell comb anchoring a white lace mantilla, fingers fat with rings worn over white gloves, a voluminous white silk gown, an ermine lined stole draped from the shoulder, bestowing an exalted, albeit fake, status; the gentleman stood to her left, somber in a scarlet, short-waisted jacket, burgundy trousers, his sash draping a saber, his shoulders buttressing braided gold epaulets, the plane of his chest host to a riot of ribbons; to complete the caricature, he limned the children as miniatures.

But, he held classes for gifted children.

And, he spoke a little English.

Arranging us on stools at easels behind him, he demonstrated, with grand flourishes, la técnica, which we duplicated, copying in blurred, shaded images his arranged still-life, the charcoal sticks, duplicated in the blurred, shaded images of an arranged still-life that bequeathed my diligent fingers to the gaunt gray of corpses.

“¡Muy bien!” he cried, clutching a hand to his breast and swinging his scarf in an arc about his neck whenever he noticed a particularly articulate rendition. It was my first taste of praise in the presence of an accomplished, and paid,painter.

“Art requires an openness of spirit! It is an intelligence of the spirit. One must draw, draw all the time, that is the secret!”

His exuberance fueled me.

“A pig and a pearl,” my father called him at one of the cocktail parties held regularly in our living room, and I am guessing that the former referred to the rumored affairs the artist had with some of the officer’s wives who lingered after a sitting, and the latter, the pearl, to a talent with the brush. One of his landscapes, a view of the city from the artist’s studio, hung in our salon, as I had taken to calling the living room.

When we could no longer afford private classes—after returning to the United States where our dollars now purchased less—I had embraced school art classes and day camp craft sessions, penciling drawings, carving tiles of linoleum into printing blocks, pasting magazine photographs in collages, papering bulletin boards with the silhouettes of presidents, folding paper planes, building science exhibits, sewing costumes, painting sets, hanging twirled paper streamers from the rafters of the gym. I had pursued anything to do with art, with that primary instinct, that alchemy of spirit and fancy, to take possession of the world in pictorial dimensions, to direct the viewer to the power of creation, to one’s personality, and sincerity, and of course the inherent doubt of one’s talent.

My zeal matched Modigliani’s.

 

“Not no, but hell no,” said my father at the end of my high school career, when, buoyed by an exuberant guidance counselor and the gloire of having been voted, in the senior superlatives, Most Individualistic and, Best Dressed, I announced my plans to attend Art School in the fall.

“It’s my life,” I said. “It’s my choice.”

“Yeah, but it’s my money.”

“But you said I could study whatever I wanted.”

“As long as you could make a living at whatever you studied. What are you going to do, draw pictures of mattresses for the newspaper?”

“Illustration is one way to go. But there are many aspects to commercial art. Or fine art, for that matter.”

“No.”

“But Ellery, artists make a living,” said my mother, in an attempt at mollification. “Look at Señor de la Cruz y Vicente.”

“Butt out, Celia,” he warned.

“But Dad,” I tried.

But there you have it: in one pithy conversation he leveled a lifetime of construction paper marvels, macaroni figures glued to paper plates, Popsicle-stick forts, lanyard necklaces, crocheted potholders, kitschy kites of cloth folded over balsa wood skeletons, collages, watercolors, charcoal sketches, acrylic landscapes, and lush oil portraits. He-who-held-the-purse-strings derailed whatever dreams I—seriously ambitious, passionately unconventional, tempestuously handsome—had of what my art could convey to the world. I, who had planned to shine, suffer, and die—the Van Gogh of his generation—could not and, did not, defy him. I put away the portfolio and became a physical therapist.

“That’s better,” he said, “the world will never run out of cripples.”

But, in putting away the portfolio, and the pencils, and the paints, I put away an essential and precious part of me, that part that had ceased to be enraptured by art, though I’d lingered long in museum galleries, and it wasn’t until that day in Venice that I found salvation and picked up my pen to describe the living skins of Modigliani.

Sentimentally exquisite, sensually violent, the portraits document a timeless beauty, the refined faces moving towards holiness, neither masculine, nor healthy, slightly deformed, a touching gloom pervading the room in which the subject sits, each the sensuous frenzy of an acute sensitivity.

At the end of his life he executed the portraits reflexively with rapid, improvised strokes and ironically, though there are many photographs of him, there are, perhaps because he feared another artist’s interpretation, no painted images. As his illness intensified, he left a last, and most personal, testimony of his art: a self-portrait, in the profile pose, not normally found in his seated portraits; his emaciated face, facing the spectator glows with a touch gaze and resembles the death mask a friend will take a few weeks later; in his hand, his last palette—the last harmonies of his brush; he embodies words spoken but ten years earlier: happiness is a grave-faced angel.

When, in the summer of his fiftieth year, and the twenty-fifth of mine, my father faltered, his body besieged by metastasizing cancer cells, I came to keep him company during the final course of radiation at the Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco. One afternoon to break the routine of the hospital, and the barracks rooms assigned to us, we drifted from one hard bench to another in the galleries of the Palace of Legion and Honor.

“Moribund,” he declared of one of those Dutch still lives of inert feathered animals splayed on a rough wooden table abutting hunting accoutrements, and a basket of seasonal fruits.

His voice, raw and raspy from the radiation, had rallied in its register, and a few head turned. And whereas before I might have turned away in embarrassment, I leaned in, this sudden, invasive illness as it consumed another inch of him, bringing a tenuous and tentative rapprochement, bridging the seven-year gulf of igneous arguments and thick, lapsed silences.

“I’m sorry you had to give up your job,” he said.

“There will be other jobs,” I said.

“I’m glad you’re here. Your mother needs you.”

“That’s why I came.”

“Great museum, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Ever wonder what would have happened if you’d gone to art school?”

“Yes.”

“I should have let you. You were good. But I worried so much then.”

“That was your job, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I guess so. But I regret stifling you like that,” he said, reaching for my hand.

I could not meet his eyes.

While I was grateful for the admission lodged in the apology, I hesitated with the absolution, staring at his hands, hand held rarely beyond a handshake, hands that had beckoned, then rejected, hands whose gestures unleashed buried messages, pinching hands, shoving hands, slapping hands, hairbrush-and-belt-grasping hands, hands whose weight, whose drumbeats of fury, lodge, forever, in one’s tissues; hands that had reneged on a pledge of any paternal tenderness. And I wondered—as he, and the ballast of his fatigue sagged against me, his chest busy with the work of his respirations, his aftershave a pungent cloud of spice masking the decay—when he had ever bestowed, upon my skin, the soft sail of caress.

“You must see Venice,” he said, apropos of nothing. “Tremendous amount of art there.”

“I will.”

“Enjoyed your letters these last few years.”

“I like to write.”

“You’re going to tell it all, aren’t you?”

“I might, sir.”

“Oh hellacious acres.”

Minutes passed.

“You know, it went quick,” he said.

“Life?” I asked.

“You do the best you can,” he said.

“You make mistakes,” I said.

“You forgive,” he said.

“We forgive one another,” I said.

“Now you sound like one of those fucking prayers I had to put up with every night when you were a child.”

 

“Look at that Modigliani,” he said.

And there he’s captured last, stooped but upright, intact, the look on his face the look of a father who struggled with fatherhood, ever that fatherless boy unable to name the atrocities of his own abnegation; a face, in his sudden sobriety, muted, resolved, resolute, silenced with the pain, pious almost, and almost, a state of grace, the lips incapable of further criticism, of admonishment, the sapphire eyes dulled, the dun features rust, the background nervous strokes of gunmetal gray, a wash of verdigris, the sketch incomplete, left to memory and remorse, left to the more mature reflections as I live beyond the age he could.

Pentimento then, the moment a painter recants his choices and through the layers one can see the presence, or emergence of earlier images, of strokes changed, painted over; from the Latin paentire, to regret and more recently from the Italian pentire, to repent; a portrait of regret, and over that, one of repentance.

“Look at that Modigliani,” he repeated.

“Magnifico,” I said.