Lucy Dacus‘s newly released album Forever Is A Feeling has been widely anticipated among music aficionados, with the 29-year-old singer even getting a full-length profile in the New Yorker last week. But it turns out that the art world has a reason to pay attention to the album, too.
Included on the album is a song called “Modigliani,” in which Dacus sings of missing her friend, the singer Phoebe Bridgers, whom Dacus performs alongside in the band Boygenius. (Boygenius’s members also include Julien Baker, newly revealed to also be Dacus’s romantic partner.) Despite its title, the song is, for the most part, not about the Italian-born modernist painter whose nudes once provoked controversy upon being exhibiting in Paris in 1917.
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But there is one line that refers directly to Modigliani and the women with almond-shaped eyes that he painted. “Modigliani melancholy got me long in the face,” Dacus croons. “But I feel better when you call.”
The line is a reference to the elongated proportions of the people in Modigliani’s paintings, whose bodies necks, hangs, and chests are intentionally not portrayed in a biologically accurate way. These paintings diverged from the norm of his day: they were portraits, not abstractions, and more specifically figurative portraits that directly referenced people who had actually modeled for Modigliani.
Critics have praised his bizarre aesthetic. (Collectors, too, have responded in kind, with one of his paintings selling at auction for $157.2 million at auction in 2018.)
“I recall my thrilled first exposure, as a teen-ager, to one of his long-necked women, with their piquantly tipped heads and mask-like faces,” critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote. “The rakish stylization and the succulent color were easy to enjoy, and the payoff was sanguinely erotic in a way that endorsed my personal wishes to be bold and tender and noble, overcoming the wimp that I was. In that moment, I used up Modigliani’s value for my life.”
What does Dacus think of Modigliani? Not much yet, but she has made efforts to yoke this new album to the art world, with performances of songs from it staged at institutions such as the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Its cover is also an artwork: a painting by Will St. John, who often makes portraits of drag queens and trans models done in the style of Renaissance paintings.
