Livorno, city of refuge
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was born on July 12, 1884, in Livorno, the Tuscan port that had for centuries been one of Europe’s most welcoming havens for Jews. Livorno never had a ghetto, and its Jewish community, largely Sephardic in origin, enjoyed freedoms unknown in most of Italy. His mother, Eugénie Garsin, had been born and raised in Marseille into a cultivated Sephardic family of scholars and merchants; her great-grandfather Solomon Garsin had come to Livorno as a refugee in the eighteenth century, and family legend, impossible, since the philosopher had no children, traced their line to Baruch Spinoza. His father, Flaminio Modigliani, came from a family of Italian Jewish businessmen with mining interests in Sardinia.
Amedeo, the fourth child, was born just as the family business collapsed into bankruptcy. A family story held that bailiffs arrived as his mother went into labour, and that the family piled their valuables on her bed, since by law creditors could not seize the bed of a woman in childbirth. Eugénie kept the household afloat by founding a school with her sisters, and she taught Amedeo at home until he was ten. His maternal grandfather, Isaco Garsin, introduced the boy to philosophy and literature.
Illness and an artist’s education
Modigliani’s childhood was shadowed by illness. He had pleurisy at about eleven, typhoid fever at fourteen and, at sixteen, the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. When he was eleven his mother wrote in her diary that it was too soon to tell what was inside this “chrysalis” and wondered: “Perhaps an artist?” During his typhoid fever he raved that he longed to see the paintings in Florence’s Uffizi and Pitti palaces; she promised to take him, and enrolled him with Livorno’s best painting teacher, Guglielmo Micheli, a follower of the Macchiaioli school.
He studied with Micheli from 1898 to 1900, then at the Free School of the Nude in Florence and at the academy in Venice. To recover his health, his mother took him through southern Italy, to Naples, Capri, Rome and Amalfi. In letters from Capri to his friend, the painter Oscar Ghiglia, the teenage Modigliani poured out a creed of artistic defiance shaped by his reading of Nietzsche, Baudelaire and Lautréamont, urging Ghiglia, and himself, to put the needs of art above all else.
Paris and Montparnasse
In 1906 Modigliani moved to Paris, then the capital of the avant-garde. He arrived well dressed, with a studio hung with Renaissance reproductions, and was considered reserved, even aloof. Within a year he had transformed himself into the archetypal bohemian of Montmartre, living around the ramshackle Bateau-Lavoir, drinking heavily, using hashish, and destroying much of his early work, which he dismissed as the baubles of a bourgeois. His first serious patron, the young doctor Paul Alexandre, bought hundreds of his drawings between 1906 and 1914.
Biographers have long debated the role of his illness in this transformation. Tuberculosis was then the leading cause of death in France, highly contagious and incurable, and its sufferers were shunned. Modigliani kept his condition largely secret; some writers, including the biographer Meryle Secrest, have argued that he allowed people to see him as a drunkard because drunks were tolerated, whereas carriers of infectious disease were not.
From stone to canvas
Around 1909 Modigliani moved to Montparnasse and, after meeting the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, devoted himself for several years mainly to sculpture. Influenced by African and ancient art, he carved elongated stone heads with long noses, small mouths and almond eyes, and planned a “temple of beauty” supported by caryatids. Several of his sculptures were shown at the Salon d’Automne of 1912. By 1914, with stone hard to obtain after the outbreak of war and his health failing, he abandoned sculpture and returned to painting.
The sculptural idiom passed directly into his canvases. His mature style, long necks, oval faces, tilted heads, eyes often left blank or filled with a single flat colour, is instantly recognisable, combining the clean lines of African sculpture with the grace of the Italian Renaissance. He painted almost exclusively people, and his portraits of fellow artists form a gallery of the École de Paris: Chaïm Soutine, Moïse Kisling, Jacques Lipchitz, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Juan Gris, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars and Jean Cocteau.
“My name is Modigliani. I am Jewish.”
In Livorno, Modigliani had grown up without feeling ostracised as a Jew. Paris was different. He arrived in a France still convulsed by the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, where antisemitic newspapers such as Édouard Drumont’s La Libre Parole sold widely and ideas of racial purity ran through cultural debate. With his Latin looks and fluent French, Modigliani could easily have passed as a gentile. Instead, as the Jewish Museum in New York documented in its 2017 exhibition Modigliani Unmasked, he often introduced himself with the words “My name is Modigliani. I am Jewish.” The British painter Nina Hamnett recalled him introducing himself to her on her first evening in Montparnasse in 1914 as “Modigliani, painter and Jew.”
He was not religiously observant, but he wore the identity openly, as a matter of pride and defiance. Many of his closest friends and sitters were Jewish émigrés from Eastern Europe, Soutine, Kisling, Lipchitz, the sculptor Chana Orloff, and the curator Mason Klein has argued that his portraits, with their masklike faces, reflect an artist acutely aware of identity as something both proclaimed and concealed.
Zborowski, the nudes and a scandal
In 1916 Modigliani met the Polish poet and art dealer Léopold Zborowski, who became his principal dealer and friend, paying him a daily stipend, supplying models and materials, and lending him his apartment as a studio. The result was the series of several dozen reclining and seated nudes, painted between 1916 and 1919, that are now among his most celebrated works, frank, sensual and monumental.
In December 1917 Zborowski arranged Modigliani’s only solo exhibition during his lifetime, at Berthe Weill’s gallery in Paris. Police closed it on its opening day over the nudes on display; it reopened, most likely after the paintings in the street window were taken down, and the show became notorious. Commercial success did not follow. Modigliani sold work for small sums and often gave drawings away in exchange for meals.
Loves and a family
Modigliani, known as “Dedo” to his family and nicknamed “Modì” in Paris, a pun on maudit, “cursed”, was strikingly handsome and had many lovers. In 1910–11 he had an intense affair with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova; later he lived for almost two years with the English writer Beatrice Hastings, a relationship marked by drunken quarrels. He had a son, Gérard, with Simone Thiroux, and is known to have had other children outside marriage. Contemporaries also recorded that he could be abusive towards his partners.
In 1917 the sculptor Chana Orloff introduced him to Jeanne Hébuterne, a nineteen-year-old art student from a devout Catholic family, which rejected her for living with a penniless Jewish painter. Jeanne became his companion and the subject of many of his finest portraits. Their daughter, also named Jeanne, was born in Nice in November 1918, during a stay on the Riviera organised by Zborowski. The couple became engaged, and Modigliani formally recognised his daughter, but Jeanne’s parents opposed the marriage.
A tragic end
By late 1919 Modigliani’s tuberculosis was in its final stage. In January 1920 a neighbour, not having seen the couple for days, found him delirious in bed. He was taken to the Hôpital de la Charité, where he died of tubercular meningitis on January 24, 1920, aged thirty-five. Artists from Montmartre and Montparnasse filled the streets for his funeral.
The next day Jeanne Hébuterne, eight months pregnant with their second child, threw herself from a fifth-floor window of her parents’ home, killing herself and her unborn child. Modigliani was buried at Père Lachaise; only in 1930 did her family allow her remains to be moved to lie beside him. His epitaph reads “Struck down by death at the moment of glory”; hers, “Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice.” Their orphaned daughter was raised by Modigliani’s sister in Florence and later wrote a biography of her father, Modigliani: Man and Myth.
Legacy
The glory his epitaph promised came quickly, but posthumously. Within a few years of his death Modigliani had become the very image of the doomed artist, his story told in novels, plays and films, and his work rose steadily in value. In 2015 his Nu couché sold at Christie’s in New York for $170.4 million, one of the highest prices ever paid for a painting at auction. His fame also made him one of the most forged artists in the world, and his catalogue remains notoriously contested.
The legend has attracted thieves and hoaxers as well as collectors. In 1984, students in Livorno carved three stone heads in Modigliani’s style and dumped them in a canal, where they were “discovered” and hailed by experts as lost works, until the students produced a video of themselves making the heads with a power drill. In 2010 his Woman with a Fan was among the paintings stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 2018 his Nu couché (sur le côté gauche) sold at Sotheby’s for .2 million, the highest price in that auction house’s history.
Yet beneath the legend lies a body of work of rare coherence: a single, unmistakable vision of the human face and figure, achieved in barely fourteen years in Paris. And beneath the bohemian myth lies a young Sephardic Jew from Livorno who, in a city thick with prejudice, chose to say exactly who he was.
Sources & further reading
Amedeo Modigliani, Wikipedia · Amedeo Modigliani’s Identity Politics, Hyperallergic (on the Jewish Museum’s Modigliani Unmasked) · Modigliani letter to Ghiglia, lot essay, Christie’s · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.