Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (Livorno, July 12, 1884-Paris, January 24, 1920) was an Italian painter, draftsman and sculptor, known for his portraits and nudes in a style that it was characterized by the elongation of the faces and figures, which was not well received during his lifetime, but which achieved great acceptance later. He spent his youth in his native country, where he studied the art of antiquity and the Renaissance. In 1906 he moved to Paris, where he came into contact with prominent artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuşi. His work is profuse in paintings and drawings, although from 1908 to 1912 he devoted himself mainly to sculpture. During his lifetime he had little success, he lived in poverty and it was not until later that his work was appreciated, his work commanding a high price. He died at thirty-five years of age from meningitis caused by tuberculosis.
Biography
Italy: Childhood and studies
He was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in the Italian city of Livorno, in Tuscany. It was a port city that served as a refuge for those persecuted for their religion and had a large Jewish community. He was the fourth child of Flaminio Modigliani and Eugénie Garsin. His older siblings were Giuseppe Emmanuele, Margherita and Umberto. A sister, Clementina, had died months before the painter's birth and her mother, in honor of her dead sister, added the name Clemente to Amedeo when Modigliani was born.
His mother, Eugénie Garsin, a French native of Marseilles, was the scion of an intellectual and scholarly family of Sephardic origin, whose ancestors hailed from Tunisia. She was fluent in several languages (French, English and Italian). Her ancestors were experts in Jewish sacred texts and founded a school for the study of the Talmud. The family history, traced by Eugénie in her own writings, helps to correct the rumors occasionally maintained by Amedeo himself, according to which her father descended from a line of wealthy bankers and her mother from the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, which is false.. Modigliani always wanted to appear to come from a wealthy family that he never had. At the end of the XVIII century , a merchant Garsin went to live in Livorno with his wife Regina Espinoza -whose relationship with the philosopher of the same name is not proven-. Thus, despite her Jewish origin, Eugénie, Modigliani's mother, was educated in the Catholic school by an English governess and received a solid classical culture, surrounding herself in a rationalist environment.
Probably from the town of Modigliana, in the Emilia-Romagna region, the painter's paternal ancestors lived from the early XIX century , though they were never "the Pope's bankers" -a family myth revived in times of crisis-. At that time, his ancestors acquired a forestry, agricultural and mining domain in Sardinia that in 1862 covered 60,000 hectares in the northwest of Cagliari. Flaminio, Amedeo's father, works that huge piece of land with his two brothers and lives there most of the time while he manages a branch in Livorno. Expelled for his support of Italian Unification (or furious at having to part with a small property for being Jewish), in 1849 he left the Papal States to go live in Livorno.
Descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 had enjoyed exceptional status in Livorno since 1593. Livorno laws grant "merchants of all nations&# 3. 4; a right of free movement, trade and property.
Amedeo's father, Flaminio, is always immersed in his business, which gradually collapses and is no longer enough to meet the expenses of such a large household: in 1884, the exact year that Amedeo Modigliani was born, bankruptcy occurred. Eugénie was pregnant by Amedeo when the justice officials showed up at her house. An old Leghorn law served to give the family a break: all objects that were on the bed of a pregnant woman were untouchable. Flaminio and Eugénie accumulated in their double bed all the jewels and objects of some value that they still possessed. That small fortune helped them settle in a more modest house and try to start a new life.
Flaminius left Livorno to try his hand at mining in Sardinia. Eugénie, who left her husband's family home, opened a language school for young ladies, while she dedicated herself to writing short stories and literary articles for some newspapers and doing translations from Italian to French or vice versa. Meanwhile, she was raising her four children, and this is how Modigliani spent his childhood between poverty and disease.
At the age of fourteen, Amedeo ("Dedo", as he was called in his family) began to attend painting classes with Guglielmo Micheli, a disciple of Fattori, one of of the painters of the Florentine movement known as the macchiaioli, a name they chose after attacks by some critics who said they painted with spots ("macchie"). Shortly after beginning his painting studies, Amedeo suffered a bout of typhoid fever and two years later tuberculosis. In 1898, his twenty-six-year-old brother, Emmanuele, future deputy of the Italian Socialist Party, was sentenced to six months in prison for being a member of the anarchist movement.
In 1902, after being taken by his mother to Naples and the Amalfi Coast to recover from his illness, he enrolled in the Free School of the Nude, Scuola libera di Nudo in Florence and the following year at the Institute of Arts in Venice, a city where he moved through the underworld, beginning a career of immersing himself in drink, drugs and frequently going to brothels.
Paris: art and debauchery
In 1906 he moved to Paris, which was at the time the center of the avant-garde. At the Bateau-Lavoir, a phalanstery for Montmartre proletarians, he met Max Jacob, Van Dongen, Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Diego Rivera, Chaim Soutine, Vicente Huidobro and other famous people. Initially influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec, Amedeo found inspiration above all in Paul Cézanne, Cubism and Picasso's Blue Age. The influence exerted on him by Gustav Klimt and the prints of the Japanese Utamaro is also evident. His speed of execution makes him famous. He never touched up his paintings, but those who posed for him said it was as if they had stripped his soul.
In 1909, he spent a brief period in Livorno, sick and deteriorated in his health due to the excesses of his daily life of constant abuse. He returns to Paris and rents a studio in Montparnasse. He considers himself more of a sculptor than a painter, and he continued on that path when Paul Guillaume, a young and ambitious art dealer, introduced him to Constantin Brâncuşi.
Constantin Brâncuşi, personally met Modigliani in 1909, just moved into his studio in Montparnasse. It was from this meeting that Modigliani's sculptural phase began, which lasted until 1914. According to the art historian Gerhard Kolberg, Modigliani's sculptures combine idealistic and plastic pretensions, with a primitive, even archaic, sculptural realization. In fact, Modigliani's figures present a strong stylization that can be seen in their heads with long necks, sharp noses and eyes represented as outlines, which are a clear reference to those primitive sculptures highly appreciated by avant-garde circles in Paris.
Discover African and Cambodian art at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. You can recognize statues of him by their almond-shaped eyes, small mouths, and elongated necks. Thanks to the help of his art dealer Paul Guillaume, he presented a series of works at the Salon d'Automne in 1912, but he had to stop sculpting because the dust caused him health problems. In the lungs. He portrayed artists who would achieve fame and renown in Montmartre and Montparnasse, such as Soutine, Diego Rivera, Juan Gris, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Pablo Picasso, Moïse Kisling, and Jean Cocteau. At the start of the First World War, he tries to enlist, but his precarious health prevents him.
Known as "Modi" Because of his friends, Amedeo exudes magnetism towards women. He has numerous romances until Beatrice Hastings enters his life, with whom he will maintain a stormy relationship for about two years. She serves as a model for him in several portraits, such as & # 34; Madame Pompadour & # 34;. When he is under the influence of alcohol, he is sad and violent, as Maria Vassilieff's drawing shows. Sober, he is shy and charming, he likes to quote Dante Alighieri and recite poems from the Count de Lautréamont's book Les chants de Maldoror ( Les Chants de Maldoror ) book from which he always has a copy nearby.
Before meeting Jeanne Hébuterne, Modigliani had a relationship with Simone Thiroux, a French-Canadian medical student, with whom he had a son, Gerard, born in 1917, who the painter never recognized as his. Given up for adoption to another family, and after a troubled childhood, Gerard became a parish priest in a small town near Paris. He knew everything about his biological father, but he never sought notoriety and died on October 30, 2004, at the age of 87. His mother, Simone, had died in 1921 due to tuberculosis (like Modigliani) at the age of 28 at the Hospital de la Charity in Paris.
In 1916, he meets the Polish poet and art dealer Léopold Zborowski and his wife Hanka (Anna) Zborowska. Modigliani portrays him on several occasions, charging him only ten francs per portrait. The following summer, the Ukrainian sculptor Chana Orloff introduces him to her friend Jeanne Hébuterne, an eighteen-year-old student who had posed for the French-Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita. When Jeanne's bourgeois family finds out about this relationship with what he was considered a depraved, she cuts off his financial allowance.
On December 3, 1917, he held his first exhibition, at the Berthe Weill gallery, but hours later the authority forced a series of nudes by Modigliani to be removed from the window and from the interior, under the accusation of public indecency. Due to his health problems, the bombings and the German siege during the First World War and advised by Léopold Zborowski, he moved to Nice with Hébuterne, who gave birth in 1919 to a daughter whom he would call Jeanne. Modigliani. At the suggestion of dealer Paul Guillaume, he produced a series of nudes (now his most sought-after works), with the intention of selling them to millionaires who vacationed on the Côte d'Azur.
In May 1919, he returned to Paris, to Rue de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse. His health is deteriorating rapidly. His tubercular meningitis had worsened considerably since November, which did not stop him from wandering the streets at night, drunk and quarrelsome.
On January 22, 1920, after staying in bed for four days without giving any news to anyone, Moïse Kisling and Manuel Ortiz de Zárate found him unconscious on the cot in his study, full of bottles of wine and empty sardine cans Jeanne, at the end of her new pregnancy, is by his side, while he continues to draw as if everything were already hopeless and there was no solution or remedy. Urgently hospitalized at the Charité hospital, he died two days later, on January 24 at 8:45 p.m., without suffering or consciousness because he had been sedated. A few days earlier he had asked the French government for permission to marry Jeanne, although he never took the step to bureaucratically arrange the necessary documents.
The most important artists of Montmartre and Montparnasse follow the funerals to the Parisian cemetery of Père-Lachaise. The funeral is impressive and large, even though Modigliani's family did not have time to attend due to a passport problem and the time it took to travel from Italy to France. On January 27, a thousand people, friends, colleagues, models, artists and all kinds of people who knew Modigliani, follow in impressive silence the hearse decorated with flowers and guided by four black horses.
Ironically, on the very day of his burial, the Devambez gallery exhibits around 20 Modigliani paintings on Place Saint-Augustin: at last, success and fame, which Modigliani desired throughout his life, will never be more were denied him after his death, as the same epitaph on his tombstone reads: "Death overtook him when he rose to fame".
Constantly watched after Modigliani's death, Jeanne Hebutérne, awaiting burial, sleeps in a hotel and then meditates for a long time next to Modigliani's body. Back with her parents, on rue Amyot, her brother takes care of her at night, but at dawn, while he was dozing, she takes the opportunity to throw herself out of the 5th floor window onto the street, committing suicide and also killing her son. that she carried in her womb. Loaded in a wheelbarrow by a worker, despised by her own mother, her body is secretly transferred to be prepared by a nurse in Modigliani's workshop on rue de la Grande-Chaumière: her family did not open the door of their own house to introduce his corpse. Not wanting to see or talk to anyone, her parents set her funeral on the morning of January 28 in a suburban Paris cemetery, almost secretly: Léopold Zborowski, Moïse Kisling and André Salmon found out and attended Jeanne's almost secret funeral with their respective wives.
The following year, thanks to Jeanne's older brother and Modigliani's friends, in particular the wife of the painter Ferdinand Léger, Jeanne's mother, Achille Hébuterne, finally agrees to have her daughter buried in the same grave as her father. companion Amedeo Modigliani in the Parisian cemetery of Père Lachaise.
Modigliani's sister, who lived in Florence, returns to Paris in order to adopt Gerard Thiroux (her unrecognized and unfound son) and his orphaned daughter, Jeanne Modigliani. The latter will write an important biography of her father entitled Modigliani: Man and Myth.
Works
- Antonia (1915), oil on canvas, Orangerie Museum, Paris.
- Authorport (1919), on canvas, Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo
Posthumous fame
The conception of his painting, based on linear design, the archaic purity of his sculpture, and his romantic life full of economic tribulations and illness, gave Modigliani an exceptional personality within the framework of modern painting, isolated from the currents of contemporary taste (cubism, futurism, dadaism, surrealism) that were developing in the same period. Modigliani is currently considered one of the greatest artists of the XX century and his works are exhibited in the main museums of the world and are preserved in hundreds of private collections.
His sculptures have rarely changed hands and the few paintings that are on the market have achieved exceptional values. In 2010 at Christie's House in Paris, one of his sculptures, Tete de Caryatide , was sold for a record 43 million euros. In November 2015, the Chinese millionaire Liu Yiqian acquired his painting Nu Couché auctioned by the Christies company in London for 170.4 million dollars (in reality, 152 million dollars, to which expenses were added). management, insured shipping and the relevant costs and fees), the second highest paid at auction on that date, only surpassed by Women of Algiers by Picasso which had sold for 179.3 million dollars in May 2015.
At the movies
In 1958 Jacques Becker directed Lovers of Montparnasse in which Gérard Philipe plays Amedeo.
Franco Brogi Taviani directed a Franco-Italian co-production called Modì in 1989 in which the painter from Livorno was played by Richard Berry.
Andy Garcia played Modigliani and Elsa Zylberstein played Jeanne Hébuterne in the 2004 Mick Davis-directed film Modigliani.
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