Amedeo Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked almost exclusively in Paris, one of the most important painters of the École de Paris movement, with little recognition by the public during his lifetime. He was born in the port city of Livorno to a Sephardic family in 1884 and trained in Italy before permanently taking up residence in 1906 in Montparnasse, where he also became a part of the bohemian circle that included Picasso, Brâncuși, and Soutine. Characterized by elongated necks, almond shaped eyes tilted at an angle, and simplified mask-like faces, his work is instantly recognisable, and is a synthesis of his own observation of the work of the Italian Renaissance painters, African sculpture and the formal experimentation of Cubism in Paris at the time. For the next four years, he worked almost exclusively in sculpture until in the last ten years, when he was impoverished, addicted, and plagued by increasingly severe tuberculosis, he resumed his painting career, creating his most important portraits and nudes. He died in Paris in January 1920 at the age of 35, and his companion, the painter Jeanne Hébuterne, killed herself the next day. He was not widely recognized until after his death, and his paintings are among the highest selling art works ever sold by auction.
Signature Works
Modigliani’s fame is overwhelmingly concentrated on two related series of paintings: intimate portraits and a series of reclining nude figures, all characterized by the same visual style of elongated form. His portraits, such as those of lovers, dealers and his own artists, Jeanne Hébuterne, Chaïm Soutine and his dealer, Léopold Zborowski—are mostly devoid of background detail, focusing attention on a stretched oval face, a seemingly unbroken line of the neck and eyes, usually rendered as a simple almond shape without pupils, and thus a feeling of inward absence, but not absence. The same elongation is expressed in his nudes of 1917, which he created while receiving the patronage of Zborowski and were exhibited at the Galerie Berthe Weill, an exhibition the police closed on for its supposed indecency, which actually did no harm to Modigliani’s reputation at the time, but has since become part of the legend surrounding these paintings. That nude series has produced some of the highest auction prices for individual pieces, and in this era paintings are reverting to the days of official condemnations. He also Sculpted, between 1909 and 1914, almost exclusively elongated stone heads that were clearly inspired by African and Cycladic sculpture, and which are smaller in number and closely linked stylistically to the paintings that have succeeded them.
Awards and Recognition
I think the most amazing thing about Modigliani’s recognition is that it came posthumously, not during his lifetime. He was not known for his regular exhibitions during his lifetime, and the one exhibition he gave solo, at the Galerie Berthe Weill in 1917, did not result in much praise but in police action over “indecency” in the nude paintings. It was only in 1922, two years after his death, that he was first shown in a solo exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris, and, two years after that, that he received a widely read biography from the poet and critic André Salmon, which began the process of romantic, tragic mythology that has become an integral part of his name. His reputation has now slowly taken off: his paintings have appeared in many major retrospectives, including at Tate Modern (2017) and the Albertina in Vienna, among many others, and are now in the permanent collections of major museums such as the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. His posthumous reputation, however, is best reflected in his income: his nude Nu couché (sur le côté gauche), sold in 1917 for $170.4 million at Christie’s in 2015, while individual sculptures and portraits have sold for over $40–70 million at auction all by themselves, making him one of the most lucrative artists in art market history.
Early Life
The most striking aspect of Modigliani’s childhood is the extent to which his education as an artist took place despite, not because of, illness. His parents’ fortunes had fallen just before his birth and he was raised up by a scholar, a woman named Eugénie Garsin, who was intellectually capable and had been homeschooled by her own mother. This intimacy seems to have accounted for: he got rather ill about a year early (pleurisy and typhoid fever and finally the tuberculosis he caught at about sixteen were the culprits), and his mother, perhaps as a consolation to the interest she was losing in her son’s schooling, fostered his early interest in drawing and painting. He started his training at the studio of Guglielmo Micheli in Livorno, then with the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and finally in Venice, where he studied the Renaissance masters, especially the Sienese, and the early European avant-garde. He had spent nearly ten years studying art formally before he left for Paris in 1906, and gained from this a technical base from which he was able to make such a radical departure from convention: one always has to be familiar with the rules pretty well before one can shake them off with the confidence Modigliani later achieved.
Inspiration
Modigliani’s imagery is like a carefully orchestrated collage of how things don’t seem to fit quite so well on paper. After his years at the Academy in Florence and Venice, he developed an affinity for the Italian Renaissance, including Sienese painting, that permeates his formal works and dominates his formal approach even in his most extreme portraitures. In Paris, he was introduced to the Post-Impressionist paintings of Cèzanne and the sculptural experimentation of Constantin Brâncuși, who inspired Modigliani to begin experimenting with sculpture for several years before he resumed painting. Equally significant was non-Western art: African masks and Cycladic figurines were then in great vogue among the avant-garde in Paris, and gave him the vocabulary for stripping the human face down to its geometric essence while still maintaining its emotional impact — perhaps the most important influence behind the elongated, mask-like style that defines his mature oeuvre. He played in the same style of artists as Picasso and the Cubists, but never joined them, taking their fascination with a flattened, reconstructed form from which he never strayed, his subject matter was always the individual human face. It is significant that Modigliani used some of the most extreme formal concepts in early twentieth-century Paris and focused them nearly entirely on a specific type of painting: portraiture and the nude, the most traditional genres of western painting. Perhaps it is the conflict between the avant-garde technique and the subject matter that makes his work so accessible to this day, even among those unfamiliar with the movements that influenced it.