- Person
- Amedeo Modigliani
- Lived
- 1884–1920
- Field
- Painting & sculpture
- From
- Italian
The story
Amedeo Modigliani was born on 12 July 1884 into a Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno, a Tuscan port that had long given refuge to people persecuted for their religion and was home to a large Jewish community. His mother, Eugénie Garsin, came from a scholarly family whose ancestors had founded a school of Talmudic studies; she taught him at home until he was ten and encouraged his love of art. His father's business had collapsed just as he was born.
Modigliani studied with the Livorno painter Guglielmo Micheli from 1898 and then at art academies in Florence and Venice, absorbing the art of antiquity and the Renaissance. In January 1906 he moved to Paris, then the centre of the avant-garde, where he came into contact with Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. He was influenced first by Toulouse-Lautrec and then by Cézanne, as well as by African sculpture, but he refused to be categorised with any of the movements of the day, from Cubism to Futurism.
At first he saw himself as a sculptor. From 1909 to 1914 he devoted himself mainly to sculpture, working for a year as Brâncuși's disciple, and in 1912 he exhibited highly stylised carved heads at the Salon d'Automne. Twenty-seven of his sculptures are known to survive. The outbreak of war, which made stone hard to obtain, and his failing health led him to give up carving around 1914 and devote himself to painting.
He developed an instantly recognisable style of portraits and nudes with long faces, necks and figures and calm, mask-like features, drawing on the art of many eras while looking entirely modern. His only solo exhibition in his lifetime, at the Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris in December 1917, caused a sensation: the police closed it on its opening day amid outrage over his nudes, though it reopened afterwards. He sold few works and only for small sums, and he died in Paris of tubercular meningitis on 24 January 1920, aged 35. His epitaph in Père Lachaise Cemetery describes him as struck down by death at the moment of glory.
After his death his reputation soared. Novels, a play, a documentary and several films have been devoted to his life. In 2015 his 1917 Nu couché sold at Christie's in New York for 170.4 million dollars, a record for the artist, and his works hang in leading museums around the world.
Why it matters
Modigliani's portraits, hanging in museums around the world, gave modern art one of its most distinctive and humane ways of seeing a human face.
About Amedeo Modigliani
Sephardic Jewish painter and sculptor from Livorno whose elongated portraits and nudes made him a legend of Montparnasse; he died in poverty at thirty-five.
More about Amedeo Modigliani
- Amedeo Modigliani fused ancient art with modern ideasAround 1911 Amedeo Modigliani's drawings combined his passion for ancient Egyptian art with the lessons of Cubism, forging the style later seen in his famous portraits.
- Amedeo Modigliani painted a generation of artistsAmedeo Modigliani's portraits of his friends, including Chaïm Soutine, Moïse Kisling, Jacques Lipchitz, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera and Jean Cocteau, form a gallery of the School of Paris.
Sources
- Amedeo Modigliani Wikipedia
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