- Person
- Amedeo Modigliani
- Lived
- 1884–1920
- Field
- Painting & sculpture
- From
- Italian
The story
In the 1910s Montparnasse, on the Left Bank of Paris, was one of the great creative crossroads of the modern world. Painters, sculptors and poets from across Europe and beyond lived and worked side by side, many of them poor and many of them immigrants. Amedeo Modigliani, a Sephardic Jew from Livorno, moved there around 1909, renting a studio after an earlier period in Montmartre. In 1914 he introduced himself to the newly arrived British painter Nina Hamnett as Modigliani, painter and Jew, and the two became great friends.
Modigliani painted almost exclusively people, and many of his sitters were the artists and writers around him. Chaïm Soutine, Moïse Kisling, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Marie Vorobyev, known as Marevna, Juan Gris, Max Jacob, Jacques Lipchitz, Blaise Cendrars and Jean Cocteau all sat for his stylised portraits. He painted Soutine several times when the two lived together in the Cité Falguière around 1916. Among his best-known works from these years are portraits of Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso from 1915, and of the art dealer Paul Guillaume and of Jean Cocteau from 1916.
From 1916 the Polish poet and dealer Léopold Zborowski became his main dealer and friend, helping him financially and organising his only solo exhibition, held in Paris in December 1917. Modigliani also painted the women in his own life, among them the writer Beatrice Hastings and the young artist Jeanne Hébuterne.
Rendered in his distinctive style, with elongated faces and calm, mask-like features, these paintings preserve the faces of a remarkable generation. The curator Mason Klein has suggested that Modigliani's own experience as a Jewish outsider led him to a portraiture that showed friends with empathy while acknowledging how much of any person remains hidden, a balance of openness and reserve that gives the portraits their lasting power.
Together, the portraits form one of the richest visual records of the international community of artists known as the School of Paris. Modigliani died in 1920, aged 35, and was mourned at an enormous funeral attended by artists from Montmartre and Montparnasse.
Why it matters
Modigliani's portraits keep alive the people who made Montparnasse a centre of modern art, many of them immigrants whose stories might otherwise be forgotten.
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 created a new language of portraitureAmedeo Modigliani, from a Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno, created portraits and nudes with elongated faces and necks that became some of the most admired images in modern art.
- 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.
Sources
- Amedeo Modigliani Wikipedia
- Modigliani Unmasked at the Jewish Museum Hyperallergic
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