Birth Year : 1884
Death Year : 1920
Country : Italy
Amedeo Modigliani was born in Italy in the Livorno ghetto. His father,
a ruined banker, died young and his mother, a descendant of the Dutch philosopher,
Spinoza, encouraged her delicate son in his aptitude for art, sending him
to study in Florence and Venice and to visit museums throughout Italy.
When Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1907, he had a small inheritance from
a rich uncle, but he was already seriously ill with tuberculosis. Handsome,
talented, sensitive, and extremely proud of his Jewish heritage, Modigliani
became one of the most notorious characters in Montmartre and was soon
penniless and often homeless. He frequently slept and worked in the studios
of artist friends who liked him and recognized his great talent as both
a painter and a sculptor. He moved to Montparnasse in 1913 and kept body
and soul together by selling drawings in cafes for infinitesimal sums.
Finally, in 1917, he married Jeanne Hebuterne and the couple set up housekeeping
in a miserable garret. It was too late for this more normal life to conquer
the ravages of consumption. Modigliani died in a Paris hospital on a January
day in 1920. His desperate widow threw herself from the roof of her parents'
apartment house on the day of his funeral, leaving their daughter to be
reared by her maternal grandparents. Two years later Modigliani's art was
discovered by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the great art collector of Pennsylvania.
Considered the leader of the School of Paris, Modigliani's subjective and
expressive art reveals his basic dignity, his despair, and a feeling of
haunting melancholy. His earliest paintings were slightly influenced by
Toulouse-Lautrec, but the bulk
of his surviving works dating from 1915 to 1920 indicate his interest in
African sculpture, in Cezanne, and the
Cubist works of Braque and Picasso
and in the simplification of form that he learned from the sculptor Brancusi.
The influences of his Italian heritage also appear in his paintings: the
Italian Mannerism. These combined in his elegant, sinuous, linear style
to produce easily recognized portraits and nudes with long slender oval
heads, sloping shoulders, and extremely subtle coloration that is less
important than line and composition. Within the framework of this mannered
stylization a great variety of distinct personalities, poetic in mood,
with a constant swanlike grace.
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Amedeo
Modigliani
Nudo
Disteso
Amedeo
Modigliani
Woman
with Red Hair
Amedeo
Modigliani
La
Bell Romaine
Amedeo
Modigliani
Jeanne
Hebuterne
Amedeo
Modigliani
Reclining
Nude
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