MODIGLIANI
(1884-1920)
He began his formal art training in 1898, and in 1902 and 1903 he studied in Florence and Venice.
In 1906 he moved to Paris, with the help of a small allowance from his mother.
He first settled in Montmarte; along with his closest friends Soutine and Lipchitz, who were also expatriate artists.
He immersed himself in cafe and night life, developing a dissolute life-style that enchanced his reputation as a bohemian but eventually ruined his life.
Modigliani worked as wildly as he had lived. Alcohol and hashish never diminished his great desire to work.
Neither did the numerous affairs with all kinds of women.
It seems his whole life was a series of protests:
Against the bourgeois smugness of his family of businessmen, and against a society that failed to recognize and reward his talent.
Desperately poor, he scavenged stone from building sites around Paris.
His sculpture, like his paintings emphasized elongated, simplified forms.
He lost many of his works because he could not pay his rent and had to move a lot. He also never kept a record of his works.
As his health began to fail around 1914 he turned to painting almost exclusively.
Leopold Zborowski became his exclusive representative and moved Modigliani to the south of France in early 1918.
Paris had become too unstable because of the fighting during World War I.
It was here that he met Jeanne Hebuterne who became his mistress.
By spring, they were back in Paris. Jeanne gave birth to a daughter in the fall and his works were beginning to sell.
But, his health took a turn for the worse. He died on January 24, 1920, of tubercular meningitis.
The following day Jeanne, nine months pregnant with her second child, threw herself from a window of her parents' home and died.
Had the artist lived a few more years, he would have witnessed a growing interest in his work.
In 1921 there was a memorial exhibition organized by Zborowski that received great acclaim.
A foreign collector named Dr. Albert Barnes, in 1922 bought a large number of his works.
What remains of Modigliani seven decades after his death?
First, there is the work, yet to be studied thoroughly, and second, the legend, now known to millions.
Alma-Tadema,
Lawrence
Asoma,
Tadashi
Bosch,
Hieronymus
Botticelli,
Sandro
Boucher,
Francois
Burne-Jones,
Sir Edward
Cezanne,
Paul
Constable,
John
Courbet,
Gustave
Da
Vinci, Leonardo
Dali,
Salvador
Degas,
Edgar
Delacroix,
Eugene
Delaroche,
Paul
Dufy,
Raoul
Durer,
Albrecht
Gauguin,
Paul
Goya,
Francisco de
Hoitsu,
Sakai
Hokusai,
Katsushika
Hopper,
Edward
Kandinsky,
Wassily
Klee,
Paul
Klimt,
Gustav
Man
Ray
Marc,
Franz
Matisse,
Henri E.
Michelangelo
Modigliani,
Amedeo
Mondrian,
Piet
Monet,
Claude
Motherwell,
Robert
Mucha,
Alphonse Marie
Munch,
Edvard
Pollock,
Jackson
Picasso,
Pablo
Raphael,
Sanzio
Redon,
Odilon
Rembrandt
Van Rijn
Renoir,
Pierre Auguste
Rivera,
Diego
Rodin,
Auguste
Rossetti,
Dante Gabriel
Rothko,
Mark
Rubens,
Peter Paul
Sargent,
John Singer
Schiele,
Egon
Seurat,
Georges
Van
Gogh, Vincent
Velazquez,
Diego
Vermeer,
Jan
Warhol,
Andy
Waterhouse,
John William
Whistler,
James Abbott McNeill
