Painter and sculptor of the modern school of Paris, born in Livorno, W Italy. His early work was influenced by the painters of the Italian Renaissance, and in Paris by Toulouse-Lautrec and the Fauves. In 1909, encouraged by the Rumanian sculptor Brancusi, he produced a number of elongated stone heads in African style. He continued to use this style when he resumed painting, with a series of richly coloured, elongated portraits. In 1918 in Paris he opened his first one-man show, which included some very frank nudes, and the exhibition was closed for indecency on the first day. His health was delicate, and his life was marred by poverty, drink, and drug addiction. It was only after his death that he obtained recognition, and the prices of his paintings soared.
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (July 12, 1884 – January 24, 1920) was a Jewish-Italian painter and sculptor who pursued his career for the most part in France. Modigliani was born in Livorno, Italy and began his artistic studies in Italy before moving to Paris in 1906. Influenced by the artists in his circle of friends and associates, by a range of genres and movements, and by primitive art, Modigliani's oeuvre was nonetheless unique and idiosyncratic.
Early life
Modigliani was born into a Jewish family in Livorno, Italy.
Livorno was still a relatively new city, by Italian standards, in the late nineteenth century. The Livorno that Modigliani knew was a bustling centre of commerce focused upon seafaring and shipwrighting, but its cultural history lay in being a refuge for those persecuted for their religion.
Modigliani was the fourth child of Flaminio Modigliani and his wife, Eugenia Garsin.
Beset with health problems after a bout of typhoid at the age of fourteen, two years later he contracted the tuberculosis which would affect him for the rest of his life.
Modigliani had a particularly close relationship with his mother, who taught her son at home until he was ten.
His mother was, in many ways, instrumental in his ability to pursue art as a vocation. When he was eleven years of age, she had noted in her diary that:
Art student years
Modigliani is known to have drawn and painted from a very early age, and thought himself "already a painter", his mother wrote, even before beginning formal studies. Despite her misgivings that launching him on a course of studying art would impinge upon his other studies, his mother indulged the young Modigliani's passion for the subject.
At the age of fourteen, while sick with the typhoid fever, he raved in his delirium that he wanted, above all else, to see the paintings in the Palazzo Pitti and the Uffizi in Florence.
Micheli and the Macchiaioli
Modigliani worked in the studio of Micheli from 1898 to 1900. In his earliest Parisian work, traces of this influence, and that of his studies of Renaissance art, can still be seen: artists such as Boldini figure just as much in this nascent work as do those of Toulouse-Lautrec.
Modigliani showed great promise while with Micheli, and only ceased his studies when he was forced to, by the onset of tuberculosis.
In 1901, whilst in Rome, Modigliani admired the work of Domenico Morelli, a painter of melodramatic Biblical studies and scenes from great literature. It is ironic that he should be so struck by Morelli, as this painter had served as an inspiration for a group of iconoclasts who went by the title, the Macchiaioli (from macchia - "dash of colour", or, more derogatively, "stain"), and Modigliani had already been exposed to the influences of the Macchiaioli.
Modigliani's connection with the movement was through Micheli, his first art teacher. Micheli's work, however, was so fashionable and the genre so commonplace that the young Modigliani reacted against it, preferring to ignore the obsession with landscape that, as with French Impressionism, characterised the movement. Micheli also tried to encourage his pupils to paint en plein air, but Modigliani never really got a taste for this style of working, sketching in cafes, but preferring to paint indoors, and especially in his own studio. Even when compelled to paint landscapes (three are known to exist), Modigliani chose a proto-Cubist palette more akin to Cezanne than the Macchiaioli.
While with Micheli, Modigliani not only studied landscape, but also portraiture, still-life, and the nude.
Despite his rejection of the Macchiaioli approach, Modigliani nonetheless found favour with his teacher, who referred to him as "Superman", a pet name reflecting the fact that Modigliani was not only quite adept at his art, but also that he regularly quoted from Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.
In 1902, Modigliani continued what was to be a life-long infatuation with life drawing, enrolling in the Accademia di Belle Arti (Scuola Libera di Nudo, or "Free School of Nude Studies") in Florence.
It is in Venice that he first smoked hashish and, rather than studying, began to spend time frequenting disreputable parts of the city.
Early literary influences
Having been exposed to erudite philosophical literature as a young boy under the tutelage of Isaco Garsin, his maternal grandfather, he continued to read and be influenced through his art studies by the writings of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Carduzzi, Comte de Lautréamont, and others, and developed the belief that the only route to true creativity was through defiance and disorder.
Letters that he wrote from his 'sabbatical' in Capri in 1901 clearly indicate that he is being more and more influenced by the thinking of Nietzsche. In these letters, he advised friend Oscar Ghiglia,
The work of Lautréamont was equally influential at this time. This doomed poet's Les Chants de Maldoror became the seminal work for the Parisian Surrealists of Modigliani's generation, and the book became Modigliani's favourite to the extent that he learnt it by heart. the fact that Modigliani was so taken by this text in his early teens gives a good indication of his developing tastes.
Modigliani wrote to Ghiglia extensively from Capri, where his mother had taken him to assist in his recovery from the tuberculosis. These letters are a sounding board for the developing ideas brewing in Modigliani's mind. Ghiglia was seven years Modigliani's senior, and it is likely that it was he who showed the young man the limits of his horizons in Livorno. Like all precocious teenagers, Modigliani preferred the company of older companions, and Ghiglia's role in his adolescence was to be a sympathetic ear as he worked himself out, principally in the convoluted letters that he regularly sent, and which survive today.
I am the prey of great powers that surge forth and then disintegrate...
A bourgeois told me today - insulted me - that I or at least my brain was lazy.
Paris
In 1906 Modigliani moved to Paris, then the focal point of the avant-garde. Modigliani's behavior stood out even in these Bohemian surroundings: he carried on frequent affairs, drank heavily, and used hashish.
At the same time, Modigliani worked at a furious pace.
He was first influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, but around 1907 he became fascinated with the work of Paul Cézanne.
He met the first serious love of his life, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, in 1910, when he was 26. Tall (Modigliani was only 5 foot 5 inches) with dark hair (like Modigliani's), pale skin and grey-green eyes, she embodied Modigliani's aesthetic ideal and the pair became engrossed in each other.
Experiments with sculpture
In 1909, Modigliani returned home to Livorno, sickly and tired from his wild lifestyle.
Although a series of Modigliani's sculptures were exhibited in the Salon d'Automne of 1912, he abruptly abandoned sculpting and focused solely on his painting.
Question of influences
In Modigliani's art, there is evidence of the influence of primitive art from Africa and Cambodia which he may have seen in the Musée de l'Homme, but his stylisations are just as likely to have been the result of his being surrounded by Mediaeval sculpture during his studies in Northern Italy (there is no recorded information from Modigliani himself, as there is with Picasso and others, to confirm the contention that he was influenced by either ethnic or any other kind of sculpture).
Modigliani painted a series of portraits of contemporary artists and friends in Montparnasse: Chaim Soutine, Moise Kisling, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Marie "Marevna" Vorobyev-Stebeslka, Juan Gris, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, and Jean Cocteau, all sat for stylized renditions.
At the outset of World War I, Modigliani tried to enlist in the army but was refused because of his poor health.
The war years
Known as Modì, which roughly translates as 'morbid' or 'moribund', by many Parisians, but as Dedo to his family and friends, Modigliani was a handsome man, and attracted much female attention.
Women came and went until Beatrice Hastings entered his life.
When the British painter Nina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse in 1914, on her first evening there the smiling man at the next table in the café introduced himself as Modigliani;
In 1916, Modigliani befriended the Polish poet and art dealer Leopold Zborovski and his wife Anna.
Jeanne Hébuterne
The following summer, the Russian sculptor Chana Orloff introduced him to a beautiful 19-year-old art student named Jeanne Hébuterne who had posed for Foujita. Despite her family's objections, soon they were living together, and although Hébuterne was the love of his life, their public scenes became more renowned than Modigliani's individual drunken exhibitions.
On December 3, 1917, Modigliani's first one-man exhibition opened at the Berthe Weill Gallery. The chief of the Paris police was scandalized by Modigliani's nudes and forced him to close the exhibition within a few hours after its opening.
After he and Hébuterne moved to Nice, she became pregnant and on November 29, 1918 gave birth to a daughter whom they named Jeanne (1918-1984).
Nice
During a trip to Nice, conceived and organized by Leopold Zborovski, Modigliani, Tsuguharu Foujita and other artists tried to sell their works to rich tourists. Modigliani managed to sell a few pictures but only for a few francs each.
During his lifetime he sold a number of his works, but never for any great amount of money.
In May of 1919 he returned to Paris, where, with Hébuterne and their daughter, he rented an apartment in the rue de la Grande Chaumière. While there, both Jeanne Hébuterne and Amedeo Modigliani painted portraits of each other, and of themselves.
Death
Although he continued to paint, Modigliani's health was deteriorating rapidly, and his alcohol-induced blackouts became more frequent.
In 1920, after not hearing from him for several days, his downstairs neighbor checked on the family and found Modigliani in bed delirious and holding onto Hébuterne who was nearly nine months pregnant. They summoned a doctor, but little could be done because Modigliani was dying of the then-incurable disease tubercular meningitis.
Modigliani died on January 24, 1920.
Hébuterne was taken to her parents' home, where, inconsolable, she threw herself out of a fifth-floor window two days after Modigliani's death, killing herself and her unborn child. Modigliani was interred in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Hébuterne was buried at the Cimetière de Bagneux near Paris, and it was not until 1930 that her embittered family allowed her body to be moved to rest beside Modigliani.
Modigliani died penniless and destitute -- managing only one solo exhibition in his life and giving his work away in exchange for meals in restaurants.
Personal life
Modigliani was known to be tortured by ill health and drink. On one occasion a fight descended into a full-blown punch-up with the inebriated duo furiously kicking and pummeling each other until Modigliani hurled her through the window of a ground-floor apartment they were visiting.
Beatrice was born in London, grew up in South Africa, rode horses in a Transvaal circus and worked as a showgirl in New York before arriving in Paris in 1914.
Initially thinking Modi 'ugly, ferocious and greedy', she was nevertheless impressed by his work and they began a tempestuous affair of high-drama.
Simone Thiroux was eight years younger than Modi, pretty, blonde and Quebec-born.
Posing for him during the day and dragging him home at night, she could usually pacify her drunken lover but subsumed her own personality into his, allowing him to sleep with his models and do as he pleased.
Rumour has it Modi also impregnated a local woman who gave birth to a daughter.
Legacy
Modigliani's sister in Florence adopted their 15-month old daughter, Jeanne.
Two films have been made about Modigliani; in 1958 Jacques Becker directed Les Amants de Montparnasse and in 2004 the film Modigliani by Michael Davis starred Andy Garcia as Modigliani.
Selected paintings
Head of a Woman with a Hat (1907), Portrait of Juan Gris (1915), Portrait of the Art Dealer Paul Guillaume (1916), Portrait of Jean Cocteau (1916), Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne (1918), Portrait of Marios Varvoglis (1920).
Selected sculptures
(Only 27 sculptures by Modigliani are known to exist.)
Head of a Woman (1910/1911).
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