Amadeo Modigliani
1884-1920
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian artist, practicing both painting and sculpture, which pursued his career for the most part in France. Influenced by a range of genres and art movements Modigliani's œuvre was nonetheless unique.
Amedeo Modigliani was born into a Jewish family at Livorno, in Tuscany. The family lived in dire poverty and Amedeo was beset with health problems when he was about eleven and after, through all his yoth. He was taken ill with the tuberculosis which was to eventually claims his life.
He worked in Micheli's Art School as a very young boy. His earliest formal artistic instruction took place in an atmosphere of the styles and themes of nineteenth-century Italian art. In his earliest Parisian work, traces of this influence, and that of his studies of Renaissance art, can still be seen. His connection with the French Impressionists was through Guglielmo Micheli, his first art teacher. He preferred to paint indoors.
In 1902, Modigliani enrolled in the Accademia di Belle Arti or "Free School of Nude Studies" in Florence and year later, at the Istituto di Belle Arti in Venice. It is there that he started bohemian life. Having been exposed to erudite philosophical literature as a young boy, he continued to read and be influenced through his art studies by the writings of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Carducci, Comte de Lautréamont, and others, and developed the belief that the only route to true creativity was through defiance and disorder.
After his arrival to Paris 1906, within a year Modigliani's reputation had changed dramatically. He became a sort of prince of vagabonds. His behavior stood out even in these Bohemian surroundings. He became the epitome of the tragic artist, creating a posthumous legend almost as well-known as that of Vincent van Gogh. We can only speculate what he might have accomplished had he emerged intact from his self-destructive explorations.
During his early years in Paris, Modigliani worked at a furious pace. He was constantly sketching, making as many as a hundred drawings a day. Many of his works were lost - destroyed by him as inferior. He was first influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and later with Paul Cézanne. Eventually he developed his own unique style, one that cannot be adequately categorized with other artists.
On December 3, 1917, Modigliani's first one-man exhibition opened at the Berthe Weill Gallery, and forced to close the exhibition within a few hours after its opening.
Modigliani was died on January 24, 1920, at the age of 35, leaving his life-long love Hébuterne with unborn child. Two days after Modigliani's death, she took life herself and to her unborn child. Since his death his reputation has soared.
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