Modigliani, Amedeo

Modigliani, Amedeo (1884–1920). Italian painter, sculptor, and draughtsman, active in France from 1906, one of the legendary figures of modern art. He was born in Leghorn (Livorno) into a Jewish merchant family. Serious childhood illness (pleurisy and typhus) prevented him from following a normal education, but in 1898 he began studying with a local landscape painter; after a brief stay in Florence in 1902, he moved to Venice, where he continued his studies at the Institute of Fine Arts. He stayed in Venice until 1906, when he settled in Paris; apart from visits to his family in Italy and a year spent in Nice and Cagnes, 1918–19, this was his home for the rest of his life, and he became a familiar figure in the café and night life of Montmartre. Although virtually his whole career was spent in France (little survives of his early work), Modigliani laid the foundations of his style in Italy with his studies of the Renaissance masters. In particular, he is often seen as a spiritual heir of Botticelli because of the linear grace of his work. His early paintings in Paris show numerous other influences, including Gauguin, the Fauves, and then Cézanne (like many other artists, Modigliani was enormously impressed by his memorial exhibition at the Salon d'Automne in 1907). In 1909, however, he met Brancusi and under his influence devoted himself mainly to stone carving until 1915, when the war made it impossible for him to get materials (his delicate health in any case made sculpture increasingly difficult, especially as the stone dust aggravated his illness). He therefore returned to painting, and his finest and most characteristic works were produced in the last five years of his short life. Both as a sculptor and as a painter his range was limited. With few exceptions, his sculptures are heads or crouching caryatid figures and his paintings are portraits or female nudes. His portraits include many of his artist friends, such as Juan Gris (Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1915) and Jacques Lipchitz (Art Institute, Chicago, 1916). Common to virtually all his work are extremely elongated, simplified forms and a superb sense of rhythmic vitality, but there is a great difference in mood between, for example, his sculpted heads (Head, Tate Gallery, London, c. 1911–12), which have the primitive power of the African masks that inspired them, and his gloriously sensual nudes (Reclining Nude, MOMA, New York, c. 1919), which were censured for their open eroticism (his only one-man show in his lifetime, at the Galerie Berthe Weill, Paris, in 1917, was closed by the police).

Modigliani's early death from tuberculosis was hastened by his notoriously dissolute lifestyle, and his mistress Jeanne Hébuterne, pregnant with their second child, committed suicide the day after he died. He had exhibited little during his lifetime, although from 1916 the Polish-born dealer Léopold Zborowski (1889–1932) supported him with regular payments. His posthumous fame was established by an exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, in 1922 and a biography by André Salmon in 1926—Modigliani, sa vie et son oeuvre. His position as one of the outstandingly original artists of his time is now secure, but his fame rests even more on his reputation as a bohemian artist par excellence: in the popular imagination he is the archetypal romantic genius, starving in a garret, addicted to drugs and alcohol, an inveterate womanizer, but painting and carving obsessively.