Tête de jeune femme, ca., 1990

Amedeo Modigliani   Master Artists

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (July 12, 1884, Livorno, Italy - January 24, 1920, Paris, France) is an Italian artist of the École de Paris. During his short life, Modigliani developed a unique and easily recognizable pictorial style, with characters with mask-like faces and almond-shaped, blank eyes. He had little success in his time, but his portraits and nudes are now amongst the most famous paintings of the 20th century.

Amedeo Modigliani began his art studies in 1898 in Livorno and then studied in Florence, then in Paris, where he moved in 1906. He lived in Montmartre, which was then the epicenter of the avant-garde, and frequented the artist studios of the Bateau-Lavoir, where he met artists such as Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob, and Jean Cocteau. First influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec, he was later inspired by fauvists and by Cézanne; he painted portraits, then female nudes with elongated silhouettes and eyeless faces resembling masks. Amedeo Modigliani also drew his inspiration from the Egyptian or Mesopotamian works he was seeing at the Louvre, from Khmer art and the figures of the Cyclades Greek islands.

The art dealer Paul Alexandre, whose portrait he painted, was the first to support him by buying several of his paintings. During a short stay in Livorno, he met the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Back in Paris, he moved to Montparnasse in the Cité Falguière and started to work with sculpture. 

He was suffering from lung disease since he was a teenager, so life in the studio was difficult to bear: his health deteriorated because of the dust generated by this new activity and he decided to give up sculpture and return to painting. However, this experience influenced his painting, it helped him simplify forms, a tendency visible in his latest works such as Max Jacob (1916), Nu assis à la chemise (Seated nude with a shirt) (1917), or Le Jeune Homme en blouse bleue (Boy in a blue shirt) (1918).

His death was marked by tragedy; his health took a turn for the worse, after years of sickness, of alcohol and drug abuse, and he died in 1920. Jeanne Hébuterne, his lover, herself a painter, who was pregnant with their second child, killed herself by throwing herself out a fifth-floor window the day after Modigliani's death.

Numerous posthumous exhibitions have been dedicated to Amedeo Modigliani's art. In 2017-2018, his works were exhibited at the Tate Modern and the Jewish Museum in New York.