Amedeo Modigliani Biography
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani, also known by the nicknames Modì and Dedo (Livorno, 12 July 1884 - Paris, 24 January 1920), was an Italian painter and sculptor, famous for his female portraits characterized by stylized faces and tapered necks. Amedeo Modigliani was born in Livorno on 12 July 1884 into a Jewish family, the youngest of the four children of Flaminio Modigliani (1840-1928), from Livorno, descendant of a family originally from Rome, and of Eugénie Garsin (1855-1927), French originally from Marseille, both atheists. When he came to light, the family was going through a serious economic crisis as his father's company, made up of some agricultural and mining companies in Sardinia especially in Buggerru in the Grugua area in Sulcis Iglesiente, was bankrupt. It was above all the mother's resourcefulness that prevented the family's economic collapse thanks to the proceeds from the nursery and primary school she founded, from private lessons and from her work as a translator and literary critic. Furthermore, he was personally concerned with the education of his children and in particular of Amedeo. Since his adolescence Amedeo was afflicted by health problems: first typhoid fever, contracted at the age of 14, then the onset of tuberculosis two years later, a form so serious that it forced the young Amedeo to abandon his studies and made some stays in Capri, from which he received considerable benefit. Often forced to stay at home due to his very poor health, Modigliani showed a great passion for drawing from an early age, filling pages and pages of sketches and portraits to the amazement of his relatives who, however, could not grant him the opportunity to enroll in any suitable course at his level; during a violent attack of the disease, he managed to extract from his mother the promise of being able to go to work in the studio of Guglielmo Micheli, one of the best students of the great Giovanni Fattorie, one of the most prominent painters in Livorno, from whom he learned his first pictorial notions, and where he met Fattori himself in 1898. Modigliani will thus be influenced by the Macchiaioli movement, in particular by Fattori himself and by Silvestro Lega. In 1902 Amedeo Modigliani enrolled at the "Scuola libera di Nudo" in Florence and a year later he moved to Venice, where he attended the Institute for Fine Arts of Venice. In 1906, Modigliani emigrated to France, specifically to Paris, which was the focal point of the avant-garde at the time. Settling into Bateau-Lavoir, a commune for penniless artists in Montmartre, he was soon occupied with painting, initially influenced by the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, until Paul Cézanne changed his ideas. Modigliani developed a unique style, the originality of a creative genius, which was contemporary with the artistic movement of the Cubists, but of which he was never part. Modigliani is famous for his rapid work: it is said that he completed a portrait in one or two sittings. Once finished, he never retouched his paintings. Yet, all those who had posed for him said that being portrayed by Modigliani was like "having your soul stripped away". Modigliani had initially thought of himself as a sculptor rather than a painter and began sculpting seriously after Paul Guillaume, a young and ambitious art dealer, became interested in his work on black sculpture, introduced him to Constantin Brâncuși in Paris and shortly thereafter to Picasso. These characters appear ancient, almost Egyptian, flat and vaguely mask-like, with distinctive almond-shaped eyes, pursed mouths, crooked noses and elongated necks. A series of sculptures by Modigliani was also exhibited at the Autumn Salon of 1912. Due to the dust generated by the sculpture, his tuberculosis worsened; he therefore abandoned sculpture, first that of limestone and then also that of wood, and concentrated solely on painting. Among the personalities portrayed by Modigliani are the painter Chaïm Soutine, his friend and also a heavy drinker, Beatrice Hastings, an English writer and journalist to whom he remained romantically linked for two years, and many fellow artists who frequented Montparnasse at that time, such as Moïse Kisling, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Juan Gris, Max Jacob; and the young writers Blaise Cendrars and Jean Cocteau. Another painter who was a great friend of his, despite frequent arguments, due to alcoholism problems was Maurice Utrillo. From the "heads", Modigliani moved on to portraits with the complete figure twisted in a spiral and to nudes drawn with a wavy line, which constitute his most typical works. Amedeo also loved to portray his partner, Jeanne Hébuterne. Modigliani's first solo exhibition was held on 3 December 1917 at the Galerie Berthe Weill. The Paris police chief was scandalized by the immorality of Modigliani's nudes in the window, and forced him to close the exhibition a few hours after its opening. His painting appeared different from everything that was done at the time, that is, a "return to order". He had something in common with the two Russian painters Pascin and Soutine, also for the tonal brightness which, together with the search for an increasingly velvety material, characterizes the work of the painter's last years. That same year, Modigliani received a letter from a former lover, Simone Thiroux, a French-Canadian girl, who informed him that she was returning to Canada and had given birth to a son with him. Modigliani never recognized the child as his, while he found his great, true love in Jeanne Hébuterne, a budding painter, with whom he moved to Provence after she became pregnant: on 29 November 1918 she gave birth to a little girl, who was also baptized Jeanne. While in Nice, Léopold Zborowski went out of his way to help him, Tsuguharu Foujita and other artists, trying to sell their works to wealthy tourists. Modigliani managed to sell only a few paintings and for a few francs each. Nonetheless, this was the period in which he produced most of the paintings that would become his most popular and valuable. The funding Modigliani received quickly vanished into drugs and alcohol. Modigliani's relationship with drugs, alcohol and other excesses is often amplified by ancient prejudices that are now difficult to remove. There are testimonies about this tendency of his, certainly reliable, but which inevitably converge on the cliché of cursed without bothering to look for other reasons. Modigliani was not the only one, in an environment like Montparnasse at the turn of the First World War, to use alcohol and hashish, indeed it can be said that those tendencies were common to most; what was striking about Modigliani's excesses was their blatantness, to the point of making Picasso exclaim one day: "One would think that Modigliani could only get a hangover at the Montparnasse crossroads". One morning in January 1920, the tenant on the floor below checked the house and found Modigliani delirious in bed, surrounded by numerous open sardine cans and empty bottles, as he clung to Jeanne, who was almost in the ninth month of her second pregnancy. A doctor was summoned, but there was little that could be done since Modigliani was suffering from tuberculous meningitis. Admitted to the Hôpital de la Charité, in the throes of delirium and surrounded by his closest friends and the heartbroken Jeanne, he died at dawn on 24 January 1920. Upon Modigliani's death there was a large funeral, attended by all the members of the artistic communities of Montmartre and Montparnasse.
