Amedeo Modigliani

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.

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