Modigliani, Amedeo

(1884–1920)

   One of the most distinctive 20th-century artists, Amedeo Modigliani was born into a wealthy Jewish family from Livorno (Leghorn) on the Tuscan coast but spent most of his adult life in Paris, where he began working as a sculptor and was greatly influenced, like many artists of the time, by African art. His life in Paris was the classic tale of the neglected genius: He had only one one-man show in his lifetime, and that was swiftly shut down by the police on the grounds of obscenity. He was interested in the work of Paul Cezanne but otherwise was little influenced by either the principal movements in the art world (fauvism, futurism, and cubism) or the left-wing politics of the Parisian art scene. The last five years of his brief life were the most memorable for his artistic production. In these years, Modigliani painted the portraits and the strikingly erotic (some would say pornographic) nudes that established his artistic reputation. His Portrait of Leopold Zborowski (1916), epitomizes his uniquely stylized form of portraiture. Zborowski, Modigliani’s closest male friend, sits in the center of the canvas, a bulky figure in a brown suit, whose shoulders taper like a wine bottle to a perfectly oval-shaped head. Detail is reduced to a minimum: The eyes are no more than a dab of unexpressive green, the sitter’s hair and beard are merely precisely defined areas of brown paint, the face is absolutely flat, the skin of the face is unwrinkled and almost monochromatic, the brown suit has a virtually indistinguishable lapel but no other adornment, and the background is an unfeatured grey-green cloth or curtain. Yet the picture conveys both an undeniable sense of character—one perceives Zborowski’s poise and intellect—and a powerful sense that the sitter has been accurately represented.

   From about 1912 onward, Modigliani was chronically addicted to alcohol and hashish. Several glasses of whisky were required to set his creative gifts in motion; he made a conscious philosophy out of living a life of excess. He died of tubercular meningitis in 1920. His last companion, Jeanne Heburtane, killed herself the following day.