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Amedeo Modigliani
(Jul.12, 1884 Livorno - Jan. 24, 1920 Paris) Italian Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Amedeo Modigliani, developed a unique style. Today his graceful portraits and lush nudes at once evoke his name as one of the worlds artist, but during his brief career few apart from his fellow artists were aware of his gifts. Amedeo Modigliani was the bohemian artist par excellence, his posthumous legend is almost as famous as Vincent Van Gogh. In stylistic terms he was an oddity, contemporary with the Cubists, but not part of their movement, he forms a bridge between the generation of Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art Deco painters of the 1920s.
Both sides of his family were Sephardic Jews. Amedeo, was their fourth and youngest child. Thanks largely to his mother, the atmosphere of the household was always unconventional, in 1898 the eldest son, aged 26, was sentenced to six months imprisonment as an anarchist.
In 1898 Amedeo Modigliani began formal art training under Guglielmo Micheli, a pupil of Giovanni Fattori, the leader of the Macchiaioli, the Italian equivalent of the Impressionist movement. He left home and went to Florence, where in May 1902 he registered at the Scuola Libera di Nudo (Free School of the Nude). In March 1903 he went to Venice, where he registered at a similar academy. There he met two of the artists and had his first real introduction to drugs and drinking.
In 1906, Modigliani settled in Paris, where he encountered the works of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pablo Picasso and assimilated their influence. The strong influence of Paul Cézanne's oil paintings is clearly evident, both in Modigliani's deliberate distortion of the figure and the free use of large, flat areas of color. There are also clear signs of influence from the art from Africa and Oceania which Modigliani saw in the Musée de l'Homme. Though he was closer to finding his artistic direction, he was still miserably poor. He rapidly made a reputation for his excesses (he had a habit of stripping stark naked when drunk) and his nickname became Modi (a pun on the French maudit, or 'accursed'). In 1909 he retired, sick and exhausted.
His friendship with Constantin Brancusi kindled Modigliani's interest in sculpture, in which he would continue his very personal idiom, distinguished by strong linear rhythms, simple elongated forms, and verticality. His sculpture was made mostly from stone stolen from building sites, easy to find as Paris was then in the grip of a building boom. What stopped him carving, and led to the final phase in his work, was the outbreak of the First World War. This brought the building boom to an abrupt halt.
After 1915, Modigliani devoted himself entirely to oil painting, producing some of his best artwork. His interest in African masks and sculpture remains evident, especially in the treatment of the sitters' faces, flat and mask like, with almond eyes, twisted noses, pursed mouths and elongated necks. Despite their extreme economy of composition and neutral backgrounds, the portraits convey a sharp sense of the sitter's personality. On December 3, 1917 Modigliani’s first one-man exhibition was opened at the Berthe Weill Gallery. Unfortunately the gallery was situated opposite a police station, the chief of which was scandalized by Modigliani’s nudes and forced him to close the exhibition within a few hours after its opening. A fine example of Modigliani's figure paintings is a Reclining Nude (1917, Guggenheim Museum, NY), an elegant, arresting arrangement of curved lines and planes as well as a striking idealization of feminine sexuality.
In the early years of the war Modigliani embarked on an affair Beatrice Hastings Madame Pompadour. She was five years older than he was (he was now thirty) and had had a picturesque career. But the relationship was marked by heavy drinking and Modigliani and Beatrice often came to blows, on one occasion he threw her out of a window. In 1917, he met Jeanne Hébuterne, who was then aged nineteen. Soon they were living together. Their public scenes became even more famous in Montmartre than Modigliani's rows with Beatrice.
Yet some, though not all, of Modigliani's many portraits of Jeanne show real tenderness, others show her as impassive and curiously graceless. By early 1918 Modigliani settled obediently in Nice, but the Mediterranean climate and landscape had no real appeal for him. He continued to paint portraits indoors, often of local shopkeepers and their children. In February 1918 Jeanne became pregnant, and soon afterwards she and Modigliani separated for a while. They were reunited before the baby, a daughter, was born. Modigliani got drunk on the way to register the child as his own and she remained officially fatherless, though she was later adopted by his Modigliani's family in Italy. In May 1919 he returned joyfully to Paris, the only environment he really liked. Jeanne, for the moment, was left behind, pregnant for a second time.
Modigliani's paintings were at last starting to fetch respectable prices. In the summer of 1919, his art dealer arranged a show of French art at the Mansard Gallery in London. It was a success and it was one of Modigliani's works which fetched the highest price. The purchaser was the writer Arnold Bennett, who said that the painting reminded him of his own heroines. In June 1919 Modigliani and Jeanne were able to move into their first real home, an apartment in the rue de la Grande Chaumière, immediately above one which had once been occupied by Paul Gauguin. But Modigliani's health was steadily deteriorating and his alcoholic collapses were becoming more frequent. He celebrated the New Year of 1920 in fine style, but about two weeks later was stricken with pains in his kidneys and took to his bed. After some days, his neighbor downstairs, called in to see if anything was the matter. He found Modigliani delirious, complaining of violent headaches. The bed was strewn with empty bottles and half-opened cans of sardines which were dripping their oil. Beside him sat Jeanne, who was nearly nine months pregnant, she had not thought of calling for a doctor, the neighbor summoned one immediately. He came and declared the case was hopeless, Modigliani was suffering from tubercular meningitis. He died without regaining consciousness, he was 35 years old. There was an enormous funeral, attended by the whole of Montmartre. Jeanne, who had been taken to her parents house, threw herself out of a fifth floor window two days later, killing herself and her unborn child. Amedeo and Jeanne are buried together.
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Reclining Nude
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Portrait of Woman in Hat
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Beatrice Hastings Madame Pompadour
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Nu couche de dos
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