Van Gogh •
Artist Biographies
•
Amedeo Modigliani
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Amedeo Modigliani |
| Birth Year : |
1884 |
| Death Year : |
1920 |
| Country : |
Italy |
Amedeo Modigliani was born in Italy in the Livorno ghetto. His father, a ruined banker, died young and his mother, a
descendant of the Dutch philosopher, Spinoza, encouraged her delicate son in his aptitude for art, sending him to study
in Florence and Venice and to visit museums throughout Italy. When Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1907, he had a small
inheritance from a rich uncle, but he was already seriously ill with tuberculosis. Handsome, talented, sensitive, and
extremely proud of his Jewish heritage, Modigliani became one of the most notorious characters in Montmartre and was
soon penniless and often homeless. He frequently slept and worked in the studios of artist friends who liked him and
recognized his great talent as both a painter and a sculptor. He moved to Montparnasse in 1913 and kept body and soul
together by selling drawings in cafes for infinitesimal sums. Finally, in 1917, he married Jeanne Hebuterne and the
couple set up housekeeping in a miserable garret. It was too late for this more normal life to conquer the ravages of
consumption. Modigliani died in a Paris hospital on a January day in 1920. His desperate widow threw herself from the
roof of her parents' apartment house on the day of his funeral, leaving their daughter to be reared by her maternal
grandparents. Two years later Modigliani's art was discovered by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the great art collector of
Pennsylvania. Considered the leader of the School of Paris, Modigliani's subjective and expressive art reveals his
basic dignity, his despair, and a feeling of haunting melancholy. His earliest paintings were slightly influenced
by
Toulouse-Lautrec, but the bulk of his surviving works dating
from 1915 to 1920 indicate his interest in African sculpture, in
Cezanne,
and the Cubist works of
Braque
and
Picasso and in the simplification of form that he learned from the
sculptor Brancusi. The influences of his Italian heritage also appear in his paintings: the Italian Mannerism. These
combined in his elegant, sinuous, linear style to produce easily recognized portraits and nudes with long slender oval
heads, sloping shoulders, and extremely subtle coloration that is less important than line and composition. Within the
framework of this mannered stylization a great variety of distinct personalities, poetic in mood, with a constant
swanlike grace.
US
"There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even-the French air clears up the brain and does good-a world of good."
