One of the things I love about reading up for a new workshop is stumbling across an unexpected discovery. You start researching one topic, then something incidental sparks your curiosity and before you know where you are, you’ve been lured down a side alley. It’s like getting lost in a city and finding something wonderful you never expected. It’s always so much more exciting.
And that’s how it was last Sunday. I am lying on the couch happily reading up on Picasso, when I come upon this extraordinary painting by Kees Van Dongen: his Modjesko, Soprano Singer of 1908. To begin with, it is the startling use of colour that catches my eye on this dark winter’s afternoon: the jelly and blancmange pinks and reds of the background, a green splotch – a hat feather perhaps – perched on a pile of blue-black hair, the golden-ochre skin set off by the powder-blue of the dress. Looking closer, I notice the magenta line that snakes around the figure, most noticeable around the arm and the fingers of the hand. I try to imagine how this painting would have looked to viewers in 1908, when men still wore top hats and women were trussed up in corsets and long dresses.
And then there is the singer’s posture, depicted in cartoonish profile, the mouth stretched open so wide that the nostrils are pulled down and a ridge of flesh warbles between her chin and pearl choker. Her torso cants forward. She really is giving it welly. It makes me remember something my mother told me, a memory from her childhood. When a soprano hit a high C on the radio, my grandmother used to wince and say, “Ooh, the bitch!”. Similarly, this painted women is taking no prisoners. It’s just so sassy!
The Drag Soprano
The boldness doesn’t stop there. I quickly learn that she is in fact a he. Modjesko was a female impersonator who enjoyed a thriving career in Europe at this time. I take a little google detour and discover (from the brilliant Black Jazz Artists blog) that Modjesko’s life is just as colourful as his portrait. He was born Edward Claude Thompson to former slave parents in South Carolina in 1878. It seems that he started out in minstrel shows, before travelling to Europe in the late 1890s as a drag singer, sometimes performing under the name of The Black Patti or The Creole Patti. For the next ten years, he pops up on the bill in capitals around Europe, including Stockholm, Paris, Rome, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Budapest. Lovers and clients come and go, some he fleeces before moving on to the next city. In Rome, he has a liaison with an advisor for the American Embassy, whom he later blackmails. The law catches up with him in Budapest and he spends seven days in jail. At various points, his companions include scammers pretending to be aristocrats, black American performers fleeing segregation and racism in America, and, of course, avant-garde artists.
Modjesko himself slides easily between personas. He is sometimes reviewed as ‘he’ and sometimes as ‘she’. On stage, he is apparently indistinguishable from ‘the real thing’. In various interviews, he claims to have studied voice at an Italian music conservatory, whereas in truth he spends his time in Rome wandering the streets under the pseudonym of Rajah Kanjit Sinhji, soliciting sex from wealthy Italian male clientele. Returning to New York in 1907, he becomes the personal secretary, and perhaps lover, to the French tenor, Léon Cazauran. Both men are arrested for talking to young boys in Central Park. In court, aware of the danger he faces as a black transvestite, Modjesko again fakes his background, claiming he is from French West Africa and hardly speaks any English. He flourishes a thousand dollars in banknotes and the charges are dropped. He escapes with a $10 fine for a dirty picture found in his coat pocket.
I search for Modjesko in Google images. It’s like when I watch a film based on a true-life story – I’m hungry for photographs of the real person. I find a signed studio portrait of Modjesko in Rome in 1905.
Of course, it is no more ‘real’ than the painting, maybe less so. But it is perhaps closer to how Modjesko himself/herself wants to be seen, artfully posed in a ruffled and beaded gown, dotted with silk flowers, the white fabric pooling at her feet, pearls at her throat and dangling from her ears. I pincer the image on the screen to as large as it will go so that I can look at the face. A faraway look in the dark eyes, but is that staged, too?
I find a second photograph. This time Modjesko is draped on an elaborate wooden chair, but it’s the same dress, perhaps the same photography session, and yes, the same far-away look in the eyes.
The Anarchist Artist
I also discover two further studies of Modjesko by Van Dongen, made in preparation for the 1908 portrait. The first (above left) is closer to the theatrical photographs: a front-on view, the same sense of flounce and femininity, the delicate hand at the breast. The mouth is open to sing, but almost demurely so. The second (above right) is closer to the final portrait. A side on view, with more emphasis on the singer’s expanded chest as her lung’s fill with air, mouth open wide, an arm stretched towards the audience. I can see now how Van Dongen takes the image one stage further in the finished work of 1908, pushing it almost into caricature. What is it he’s trying to get at, I wonder? I want to know more.
I learn that when he painted Modjesko, Soprano Singer, Van Dongen was already known as a painter of prostitutes. He was living by this time in Paris’s bohemian district of Monmartre, which at that time was full of brothels and streetwalkers. I discover, however, that it is not in Paris that Van Dongen encounters Modjesko. It is on a visit to his hometown of Rotterdam, at the Circus Varieté, that he sees, and is clearly captivated by, Modjesko. His interest in Rotterdam’s demi-monde goes back to his time there as a young man. Cornelus Theodorus Maria ‘Kees’ Van Dongen (born 1877) was from a good middle-class family and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam, but already, in his student days, he was frequenting the Red Quarter seaport area of de Zandstraat. He made a number of paintings depicting its closely packed streets at night, full of sailors and streetwalkers, the sultry lights glowing in its bars and nightclubs.
Importantly, as I discover from Patricia Leighton’s fascinating book, The Liberation of Painting, this attraction to prostitution as a subject is intertwined with Van Dongen’s emerging political ideas. By the late 19th century, he is a member of anarchist symbolist circles in Rotterdam. In 1896 he illustrates the cover of the Dutch translation of Kropotkin’s Anarchy: Its Philosophy and Ideal. After moving permanently to Paris in 1900, he contributes many political cartoons to left-wing and anarchist publications such as L’Assiette au Beurre, Cri de Paris, and Les Temps Nouveau. In fact, he briefly gives up painting altogether for this more populist medium. As he explains to a friend, “What is one doing turning out paintings, serving luxury, and this at a time when one is surrounded by poverty everywhere.” His work includes a series of cartoons for a special issue of L’Assiette au Beurre on prostitution. In a series of bold images, he charts the journey of a young girl from poverty, to single-motherhood, to a brief period of prosperity as a sex worker in the city, to the inevitable decline and death from syphilis, at which point the same fate befalls her daughter.
As well as his empathy for sex workers, who he sees as the victims of capitalism, he is also, like many anarchists, a sexual liberationist. For him, sexual freedom is the expression of an individual’s self-ownership. His rejection of the conventions of bourgeoise art, expressed through his wild style of painting, goes hand in glove with his belief in personal liberation, regardless of class, gender or sexuality. The anarchist dream is to create a new society where everyone can thrive as the person they truly are, following their deeper more primitive desires, free from the constraints imposed by hypocritical bourgeois mores, capitalist profiteering, and government corruption.
Wild colour and Audacious Freedom
And this, I start to realise, is where the lives of the young anarchist artist and the drag soprano intersect. Both are trying to construct a freer, more authentic life for themselves. They seek this liberation in the permissive sub-cultures of Europe’s major cities, in the café’s, theatres and nightclubs where gay European aristocrats, black drag queens, politicised workers, left-wing intellectuals, and avant-garde artists rub shoulders. It is a world where the usual social boundaries and hierarchies can be momentarily blurred.
I return to Van Dongen’s vision of Modjesko. I’m starting to sense something else in this image. I keep coming back to the large, dark, heavily lidded eye, the artifice of the black eyebrow, a sense of latent strength in the back and shoulders, the pride in the lifted head that belies the theatrical, feminine gesture of the hand on the breast. A mixture of defiance and fragility, authenticity and artifice, and perhaps also of beauty and cruelty.
It’s at this point that I go to the website of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the portrait now forms part of the permanent collection. I want to find a good reproduction of the painting. What I also find is a wonderful audio description of the painting by the performer Monét X Change, best known from Ru Paul’s Drag Race. For me, they nail the heart and soul of Van Dongen’s portrait better than any art historian:
I love how they chose to illustrate this Black man in 1908 in this fabulous blue hair—it’s almost like Marge Simpson—and this green hat and this yellow body. That’s what’s very striking to me is all the colors. We all grew up in a very binary world and it’s hard to see past what we are told that we have to be. I started doing drag because it really helped me discover my identity, and it opened up my eyes to what life could be like in full color.
It is perhaps ironic that the portrait of Modjesko now resides in one of New York’s classiest cultural destinations, in the same city where he stood trial alongside Cazauron. In Van Dongen’s portrait, Modjesko continues to shine, exemplifying a life lived as freely and audaciously as was possible at that time, and in full, vivid colour. And for me, that’s what this painting is about, from its captivating subject matter to its riotous visual anarchy.
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