The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (18 page)

Josefa, Goya set out to seduce her. He succeeded. She was four months pregnant when Goya was forced to marry her on July 25, 1775. Five months later their first child, a son named Eusebio, was born. The boy did not survive his childhood. In all, Josefa gave birth to five—possibly six—children, but only one, a son named Xavier, lived to maturity. The marriage proved profitable to Goya in another way. His brother-in-law, after all, had court connections, and Bayeu was able to get Goya a steady job in the royal tapestry factory. Once Goya had entrée to the aristocratic ladies of Madrid, Josefa faded into the background of his life.

Goya was moved to paint only one portrait of her.

The most desirable of the aristocratic women was the headstrong, spirited, promiscuous, 20-year-old Duchess of Alba, who had been wedded to the moody Marquis of Villafranca when she was 13. Goya lusted for her from the first day he saw her. He had reason to. Her beauty was breathtaking. A contemporary said of her: “The Duchess of Alba does not have a single hair on her head which would not kindle the flame of desire. There is not a more beautiful thing in the world…. When she walks in the street everybody watches her from the windows, and even the children stop playing in order to look at her.”

Goya met the duchess casually at a social gathering. Then, one day in the summer of 1795, she called on him at his studio. She wanted him to paint her face, that is, she wanted a makeup job. Goya wrote his close friend Zapater that she “sneaked into my studio for this purpose and got away with it; needless to say, this gives me more pleasure than painting on canvas; I am supposed to do her full portrait.”

After that he began to see the Duchess of Alba often. He wanted to possess her, and she wanted him. At last, in the words of the period, she granted him
Painting The Town
/ “her final favors.” Ecstatic over his conquest, Goya confided in a letter to Zapater,

“
I finally know what life means
.”

When the Duchess of Alba’s ailing husband died in 1796, she withdrew to her estate in Sanlucar de Barrameda in Andalusia to mourn the occasion properly. She took Goya along. They stayed together for several months. He devoted himself to painting and having sexual intercourse with her regularly. She posed for him both dressed and undressed. Goya painted her respectably clothed in black, but wearing rings on the index and middle fingers of her right hand; one ring was inscribed “Goya,” the other “Alba.” Moreover, she was shown pointing down to a phrase scratched in the sand that read, “
Solo Goya
” (“Only Goya”). Other representations of the duchess in Sanlucar were more revealing.

There were hundreds of sketches, many of them showing her in total nudity.

“One of them,” wrote a contemporary, “shows the lady’s beautiful nakedness from the back, with her buttocks, waist, and hips exposed.” The duchess allowed Goya to save the drawings. On one of these he wrote, “It is madness to keep this, but each according to his own taste.”

Returning to Madrid, the duchess temporarily abandoned Goya to have a love affair with an older man, Lt. Gen. Don Antonio Cornel. Embittered, Goya painted three pictures of the duchess that depicted her flightiness—one showing her with a double face. But by 1799 she was back in Goya’s arms once more and posing for the two paintings that were to become the artist’s most popular works,
The Naked Maja
and
The Clothed Maja
. The clothed version was to be hung in front of the naked one for propriety. Goya’s nude of her was the first such oil to be depicted, in the words of André Malraux, as “erotic without being voluptuous.” These two paintings the duchess kept for herself. They were later inherited by Manuel de Godoy, the queen of Spain’s lover.

The Duchess of Alba died suddenly in July of 1802. She remembered her love for Goya in her will by bequeathing the sum of 3,500 reales annually to Goya’s son Xavier. Ten years later Goya’s wife, Josefa, died. The painter’s son had married a wealthy trader’s daughter by then and had his own residence.

Goya was left quite alone.

He moved out of Madrid to a place by the side of the Manzanares River.

There he met a lively and liberal-minded young woman named Leocadia Zorrilla de Weis. She was still married to a businessman, Isidro Weis, but soon her husband petitioned for a separation from his wife on the grounds of her “mis-behavior and infidelity.” Undoubtedly Goya, at 68, was making love to Leocadia. In 1814 she gave birth to a girl, whom she named Rosarito. Goya doted on the little girl and encouraged and trained her to paint, hoping in vain that Rosarito harbored real talent.

In 1824, fearful of the excesses of a new government in Spain, Goya, accompanied by Leocadia and little Rosarito, fled to France and settled down in a small house with a garden in Bordeaux. Hot-tempered Leocadia often argued with Goya, but generally she amused him and looked after him. Goya spent his time taking walks, painting a little, napping a lot. He died at the age of 82.

—W.A.D. and I.W.

Model Lover

AMEDEO MODIGLIANI (July 12, 1884–Jan. 24, 1920)

HIS FAME:
One of this century’s great

original artists, Modigliani is famous for

the 25 stone sculptures, approximately

he produced during his short life. Most

of his works are of women; many are

nudes. Among the best-known are
Seated

Nude
,
Little Girl in Blue
, and
Jeanne
Hébuterne
.

HIS PERSON:
The youngest child of a

Jewish merchant family, Modigliani

was born in Leghorn, Italy, just as a

business crash forced his father into

bankruptcy. A quirk in Italian law eased

Modigliani at 33

the family’s pain: A bankrupt could

keep a bed in which a woman had recently given or was about to give birth.

At the moment of Modigliani’s birth, officials were seizing the household goods, but the family took full advantage of the law and heaped the maternal bed with personal possessions and valuables. That incident, in which good fortune was salvaged from a dire predicament, is perhaps symbolic of Modigliani’s life.

In 1895 and 1898 he contracted typhus. Forced to quit school, he turned to painting, which, except for a four-year period devoted to sculpting, he never left.

Moving to Paris in 1906, Modigliani was swept up in the bohemian milieu of that city’s artists (Picasso among them). A prodigious drinker, Modigliani often stumbled through the streets drunk—and sometimes naked. His fights with other men over women were legion. He consumed enormous amounts of cocaine and hashish. In 1917 his one-man show consisting almost entirely of female nudes was closed by the police, who judged his paintings indecent. It was the only exhibition of his paintings during his lifetime. Through it all, Modigliani continued to paint until tubercular meningitis took his life. His fame while he was alive was restricted to the Parisian art community, but by 1922 he had become internationally acclaimed.

SEX LIFE:
Modigliani loved women. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, were made love to by this elegantly handsome painter. While still a schoolboy, he noticed how girls were smitten by his good looks. Legend places his
Painting The Town
/ loss of virginity at 15 or 16 years of age, when, it is said, he made love to a maid employed by his family.

Although he occasionally visited brothels, his favored sex partners were his models. During his career he had hundreds of models. Most sat for him in the nude, and before the painting sessions closed, they had usually made love with him. His preferred subjects (and lovers) were simple women, such as the peasant girls who took in laundry for a living. Flattered by the attentions of this attractive artist, these humble women eagerly gave themselves to him.

SEX PARTNERS:
Despite his many sex partners, Modigliani loved only two women. The first was Beatrice Hastings, an aristocratic British poet five years his senior. They met in 1914, made love the first night, and became inseparable. They drank, danced, and fought. Modigliani beat her frequently. When enraged—usually because she had paid attention to another man—he would literally drag her down the street by her hair. She inspired him, however, and in the bloom of their love he entered his most prolific period of painting, with Beatrice often sitting as his model. Nonetheless, this affair, because of its intensity in all likelihood, did not last. Beatrice fled from him in 1916.

They never saw each other again.

Modigliani mourned this loss, but not for long. In 1917 he met Jeanne Hébuterne, a 19-year-old art student from a French Catholic family. A tiny, pale girl, Jeanne and Modigliani set up house on the Côte d’Azur within months of their first meeting, despite her parents’ opposition to the Italian Jew. It was her lot not only to model for Modigliani, but to see him through his final, failing years, as his health, ever fragile, worsened owing to debauchery.

In November, 1918, their love produced a baby girl, and in July, 1919, Modigliani vowed to marry Jeanne “as soon as the papers arrive.” Why they never married remains a mystery, since they were devoted to each other and remained together until Modigliani’s death six months after his oath. As the painter lay dying in Paris, he supposedly suggested that Jeanne join him in death “so that I can have my favorite model in paradise and with her enjoy eternal happiness.” Jeanne was in a state of despair on the day of Modigliani’s funeral. Pregnant with a second child, she jumped out of a fifth-floor window to her death.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“If a woman poses for you, she gives herself to you.”

—R.M.

The Rich Bohemian

PABLO PICASSO (Oct. 25, 1881–Apr. 8, 1973)

HIS FAME:
He was without doubt the

most original, forceful, and influential

personality in the visual arts in the first

three quarters of this century.

HIS PERSON:
Born in Málaga, Spain,

son of José Ruiz Blasco, an art teacher

and sometime painter, Picasso had little

formal education and not much more

training in art, being clearly superior to

his teachers. Legend has it that when

Picasso’s father realized the scope of his

son’s artistic genius, he gave him his

own brushes and colors and did not

paint again. In his late teens Picasso

joyfully discovered the bohemian life in

Barcelona; he continued his exuberant

Picasso at age 66

lifestyle on visits to Paris, where he was

immediately inspired by the streets of Montmartre and the works of Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Cézanne. He was from the beginning an extraordinarily prolific painter. From the age of 20, in accordance with Spanish custom, he signed his works with his mother’s maiden name—Picasso.

In 1904 he quit Barcelona and moved to Paris. There he and Georges Braque, working together, founded the Cubist movement. “When I want to paint a cup,” Picasso said, “I will show you that it is round, but it may be that the general rhythm and construction of the picture will oblige me to show that roundness as a square.”

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 ended his political apathy; he became a passionate Loyalist, and the destruction of a small Basque town by Hitler’s bombers inspired what many consider to be his masterpiece, the huge canvas
Guernica
. Throughout both world wars he remained in France.

Picasso’s energy was relentless. Habitually a late riser, he saw his friends in the afternoon and then worked far into the night. Although he was only about 5 ft. 4 in. tall, the intensity of his black eyes and his often explosive presence gave the impression of a much larger man. He settled comfortably into fame, earning millions each year from his prodigious output—an estimated 14,000 canvases, 100,000 prints and engravings, and 34,000 book illustrations. A multitude of objects—mementos, paintings, antiques, African sculptures, junk, old clothes—were carefully retained as he moved through
Painting The Town
/ various houses, studios, wives, and lovers. When Picasso died at 91 in his hill-side villa at Mougins, France, he left an estate valued at $1.1 billion.