Word: modigliani
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Simon spends several months a year in Los Angeles, a necessity for his film career, and the rest in Manhattan, which he calls home. The ten-room Los Angeles dwelling, of white brick and wood, houses an extensive collection of modern art (including works by Modigliani and Edward Hopper) and sits above three tiers of terraces, with the obligatory swimming pool on the bottom tier, although Simon does not swim. He is a passionate tennis player, yet the house has no tennis court. "First you wind up providing the balls, then the Cokes?there's no end to it," Simon...
Soon enough, so was he. Paris would place before Modigliani its full arsenal of new ideas. Like Picasso, he would make a crucial encounter there with African wood carvings. Their wild distortion of the human face and figure would point him in a new direction--for one thing, toward the asymmetrical almond eyes, sometimes painted without pupils, that became one of the signature tropes of his portraiture. Unlike Picasso, he used African sculpture not as a route into his fears and sexual obsessions but as a much more benign vocabulary of forms that could be joined with other influences...
Although his weak lungs made it hard for him to lift a hammer, Modigliani initially thought of himself as a sculptor more than a painter. Three years after his arrival in Paris, he would meet Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor whose search for simplified line and form would touch something deep in Modigliani. It was through his sculptures in particular, nearly all of them totemic busts like Head of a Woman from 1912, that he would arrive at the sign system that he carried back into painting--ovoid heads on elongated Mannerist necks, with the nose a long, sharp fuselage...
Given the Sturm und Drang of his life, you would fully expect Modigliani to draw like Egon Schiele, tormented figures tied into knots by their own perplexities. Instead he deployed the most serene line in the whole School of Paris, a line that stretches back four centuries to the elongated figures of Pontormo and Parmigianino. Modigliani came to Paris not only as a Jew but also as an Italian, steeped in the art of the quattrocento and the High Renaissance and their Mannerist aftermath. You find the sources of his poised, limpid line in the elegant whiplashing of Botticelli...
...show ends with the nudes that were the subject of the only solo exhibition that Modigliani had in his lifetime. Something about the way they combined simplified figuration with frank tufts of armpit and pubic hair shocked even Paris. The gendarmes were alerted and closed the show down. You won't have to worry about that now. You'll just have to fight the crowds...