Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was born on July 12, 1884, in Livorno, a port city on the Tuscan coast with a long established Sephardic Jewish community to which his family belonged ^[1]. He was the fourth child of Flaminio Modigliani, a businessman whose ventures had recently collapsed, and Eugénie Garsin, a cultivated woman of French Sephardic descent who ran a small school and worked as a translator to support the household. Family accounts hold that bailiffs arrived to seize the family's property around the time of Amedeo's birth, and that the Garsins' cosmopolitan learning shaped him far more than his father's commerce ^[1].

Illness marked his childhood. He suffered an attack of pleurisy at about eleven, then typhoid fever, and at sixteen a bout of tuberculosis that would shadow the rest of his life ^[2]. During his recovery his mother took him on a journey through southern Italy, visiting Naples, Capri, Rome, and Florence, where he absorbed the painting and sculpture of the Italian past at first hand. His mother, who recorded his development in her diary, supported his wish to paint, and in 1898 he began studying with Guglielmo Micheli, a Livorno artist trained in the Macchiaioli tradition of Tuscan open air painting ^[1].

In 1902 Modigliani enrolled at the Scuola Libera di Nudo in Florence, and the following year he moved to Venice to continue his studies at the Istituto di Belle Arti ^[2]. In Venice he encountered a bohemian circle, reportedly experimented with hashish, and read Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and D'Annunzio. By the time he left Italy he had a solid academic grounding in drawing and a temperament already pulling him toward the artistic capital of Europe.

Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906, settling first in Montmartre near the Bateau Lavoir, the ramshackle building where Picasso and his circle worked ^[3]. He enrolled briefly at the Académie Colarossi, dressed at first like a well bred bourgeois, and within a few years had shed both the wardrobe and the money that came with it. Any Amedeo Modigliani biography must reckon with these Paris years, when he lived in a succession of cheap studios, drank heavily, used hashish and later absinthe, and earned the nickname Modì, which his French friends heard as a pun on maudit, the accursed one ^[2].

His early Parisian work responded to Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, and the Symbolists, and in 1907 he met the physician and collector Paul Alexandre, who became his first patron and bought many of his canvases and drawings ^[3]. Modigliani exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1908 and at the Salon d'Automne, but sales were rare and reviews scarce. He stood apart from the movements around him: he never joined the Fauves or the Cubists, though he knew their leading figures well.

A decisive friendship began in 1909 when he met the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who encouraged his turn to carving ^[4]. For roughly five years sculpture became his central pursuit. Working mostly in limestone, some of it reportedly scavenged from building sites, he produced a series of elongated heads with narrow noses, blank almond eyes, and columnar necks, forms indebted to African, Khmer, and archaic Greek carving as well as to the caryatid tradition. Seven of these heads were shown together at the Salon d'Automne of 1912 ^[4]. The dust of direct carving aggravated his damaged lungs, and by about 1914, with wartime shortages compounding the problem, he abandoned sculpture and returned to painting. The sculptor's discipline stayed with him: the simplified oval faces and long necks of his mature portraits are painted versions of the stone heads.

The paintings of Modigliani's final six years constitute his chief legacy, and they are almost entirely portraits and nudes. He painted the artists and writers of wartime Montparnasse, among them Picasso, Diego Rivera, Juan Gris, Chaim Soutine, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Jacob, and Jean Cocteau, rendering each with the same stylized vocabulary: tilted oval head, attenuated neck, sloping shoulders, and frequently eyes filled with flat color rather than pupils ^[3]. The style is instantly identifiable, which is one reason his work reproduces so widely, yet within its constraints he registered individual character with unusual economy.

Among Amedeo Modigliani achievements, the series of reclining nudes painted between about 1916 and 1919 ranks highest. Commissioned largely by his dealer Léopold Zborowski, a Polish poet who supported him with a modest stipend, studio space, and models, these canvases present frankly sensual women, often gazing directly at the viewer ^[5]. When Berthe Weill's Paris gallery mounted Modigliani's only solo exhibition in his lifetime in December 1917, police ordered nudes removed from display, objecting, according to standard accounts, to the visible body hair that broke with academic convention ^[5]. The show was a commercial failure. A century later one of those paintings, Nu couché of 1917, sold at Christie's New York in November 2015 for 170.4 million dollars, then the second highest auction price ever paid for any artwork ^[6].

His late portraits of Jeanne Hébuterne, painted in warm ochres and muted blues, are among the most tender images in modern art, and his 1919 portraits made in Nice show a new serenity of color and design ^[3]. Modigliani left roughly 420 surviving paintings along with numerous drawings and about 25 stone sculptures, a small body of work by the standards of his contemporaries, but one that has proved remarkably durable. Museums holding significant examples include the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate in London, and the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris ^[3].

Modigliani's private life supplied much of the legend that later engulfed his art. Handsome, well read, and quick to recite Dante from memory, he was also volatile, chronically poor, and dependent on alcohol and drugs, habits some biographers interpret partly as a way of masking the tuberculosis he concealed from friends, since the disease was contagious, stigmatized, and incurable at the time ^[2].

In 1914 he began a stormy two year relationship with the South African born English writer Beatrice Hastings, who appears in a number of his portraits ^[3]. Earlier friendships included a close attachment to the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in 1910 and 1911, whom he drew repeatedly. In 1916 he met the Canadian journalist Simone Thiroux, who bore a son he never recognized.

The central relationship of his last years began in the spring of 1917, when he met Jeanne Hébuterne, a nineteen year old art student at the Académie Colarossi ^[7]. Her conservative Catholic family opposed the liaison with a penniless Jewish painter, but the couple lived together on the rue de la Grande Chaumière. Their daughter, also named Jeanne, was born in Nice on November 29, 1918, while the couple sheltered in the south of France from the war and, they hoped, for the sake of the painter's health ^[7]. Modigliani painted Hébuterne more than twenty times, and he signed a written pledge to marry her, a promise his death left unfulfilled.

The move to the Riviera in 1918, arranged by Zborowski, gave Modigliani a final productive interval. In Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer he painted local children, servants, and shopkeepers alongside Hébuterne, working in a lighter palette that some critics link to Cézanne's late influence ^[3]. He returned to Paris with Hébuterne and their infant daughter in May 1919. That summer his work appeared in a London group exhibition of modern French art at the Mansard Gallery, organized with the help of the Sitwell family, where it drew serious critical attention and buyers, a first taste of the recognition that had eluded him in Paris ^[2].

His health, however, was collapsing. Years of poverty, drink, and untreated tuberculosis had left him emaciated, and in January 1920 neighbors found him delirious in his studio, with Hébuterne, then heavily pregnant with their second child, beside him. He was carried to the Hôpital de la Charité, where he died of tubercular meningitis on January 24, 1920, at the age of thirty five ^[1].

The aftermath turned tragedy into legend. On January 26, the day after his death by some accounts and two days after by others, Jeanne Hébuterne threw herself from a fifth floor window of her parents' apartment, killing herself and her unborn child ^[7]. Modigliani was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris with a large crowd of Montparnasse artists in attendance. Hébuterne, first buried elsewhere by her family, was reinterred beside him in 1930. Their orphaned daughter Jeanne was raised by Modigliani's sister in Italy and later wrote a documented biography of the father she never knew ^[7].

Prices for Modigliani's work began climbing almost immediately after his death, a reversal so swift that it became a byword for the market's neglect of living artists. His posthumous fame was amplified by romanticized retellings, including the 1958 French film Les Amants de Montparnasse with Gérard Philipe and a 2004 English language film starring Andy Garcia, treatments that scholars often fault for favoring the myth of the doomed bohemian over the disciplined artist ^[2]. Serious study has worked to correct the balance, notably Meryle Secrest's 2011 biography, which argues that tuberculosis, not temperament alone, drove much of his self destructive behavior ^[8].

His influence runs through twentieth century figuration, visible in the stylized portraiture of later painters and in the continuing appeal of the elongated figure as an expressive device. Major retrospectives, including a Tate Modern exhibition in London in 2017 and 2018 that assembled the largest group of his nudes ever shown in Britain, have drawn large audiences and fresh scholarship ^[9]. Attribution remains a serious problem: Modigliani is among the most forged artists in history, a situation dramatized in 2017 when Italian authorities seized paintings from a Genoa exhibition after experts declared a large number of them fakes ^[10].

The basic Amedeo Modigliani facts, an output of about 420 paintings, a short career, a single lifetime exhibition, and record auction prices a century on, sketch one of art history's sharpest contrasts between contemporary neglect and posthumous glory. In Livorno, his birthplace, and in the Paris studio building where he died, now maintained as an artistic landmark of Montparnasse, his memory is actively preserved, and his portraits continue to define the popular image of bohemian Paris in the 1910s ^[1].