Modigliani famous paintings. Bibliography and filmography

Biography of Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is like a novel about a classical genius.

Short life, like a flash. Early death. The deafening posthumous fame that overtook him literally on the day of the funeral.

The paintings that the artist left as payment for lunch in a cafe suddenly become worth tens of millions of dollars!

And also the love of my life. With a beautiful young girl who looks like Princess Rapunzel. And the tragedy is worse than the story of Romeo and Juliet.

If all this were not true, I would snort, “Oh, this doesn’t happen in life!” Too twisted. Too emotional. Too tragic."

But everything happens in life. And this is just about Modigliani.

Unique Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani. Red-haired woman. 1917 National Gallery Washington

Modigliani is mysterious to me like no other artist. For one simple reason. How did he manage to create almost all of his works in the same style, and so unique?

He worked in Paris, communicated with Picasso,. I saw the work and... But he didn’t fall under anyone’s influence.

It feels like he was born and lived on a desert island. And he wrote all his works there. Unless I saw African masks. Maybe a couple of works by Cezanne and El Greco. Otherwise, his painting has almost no impurities.

If you look at early works any artist, you will understand that first he was looking for himself. Modigliani's contemporaries often started with . Like or . And even .

Left: Edvard Munch “Rue Lafayette”, 1901. National Gallery Oslo, Norway. Right: Pablo Picasso “Bullfight”, 1901 Private collection. Bottom: Kazimir Malevich “Spring, apple tree in bloom”, 1904 Tretyakov Gallery.

Sculpture and El Greco

In Modigliani you will not find this period of self-searching. True, his painting changed a little after he was engaged in sculpture for 5 years.

Amadeo Modigliani. Head of a woman. 1911 National Gallery Washington

Here are two works created before and after the sculptural period.

It’s immediately noticeable how much Modigliani’s sculpturalism transfers into painting. His famous elongation also appears. AND Long neck. And deliberately sketchy.

He really wanted to continue sculpting. But since childhood he had diseased lungs, tuberculosis returned over and over again. And stone and marble chips aggravated his illness.

Therefore, after 5 years he returned to painting.

I’ll also risk looking for similarities between Modigliani’s works and El Greco’s works. And it’s not just about the elongation of faces and figures.

El Greco. Saint James. 1608-1614 Prado Museum, Madrid

For El Greco, the body is a thin shell through which the human soul shines through.

Amedeo followed the same path. After all, the people in his portraits bear little resemblance to how they really looked. Rather, it conveys character, soul. By adding what a person did not see in the mirror. For example, asymmetry of the face and body.

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This can also be seen in Cezanne. He also often made the eyes of his heroes different. Look at the portrait of his wife. It’s as if we read in her eyes, “What did you come up with again? You’re making me sit here like a tree stump..."

Paul Cezanne. Madame Cezanne in a yellow chair. 1890 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Portraits of Modigliani

Modigliani painted people. I completely ignored still lifes. His landscapes are also extremely rare.

Andrey Allahverdov. Amedeo Modigliani. 2015 Artist's collection

He has many portraits of his friends and acquaintances from his circle. They all lived, worked and played in the Montparnasse district of Paris. Here, poor artists rented the cheapest housing and went to the nearest cafes. Alcohol, hashish, partying until the morning.

Amedeo especially took care of the unsociable and sensitive Chaim Soutine. A sloppy, withdrawn and very original artist: his whole essence is before us.

Mismatched eyes, crooked nose, different shoulders. And also the color scheme: brown-gray-blue. Table with very long legs. And a tiny glass.

In all this one can read loneliness, inability to cope with life. Well, truthfully, without flattery.

Amadeo Modigliani. Portrait of Chaim Soutine. 1917 National Gallery Washington

Amedeo wrote not only to friends, but also to unfamiliar people.

There is no such thing as one emotion prevailing in him. Like, make fun of everyone. Be touched by everyone.

He is clearly being ironic about this couple. An elderly gentleman marries a young girl of humble origin. For her, this marriage is an opportunity to resolve her financial difficulties.

Amadeo Modigliani. Bride and groom. 1916 Museum contemporary art, New York

The fox-like cut of her cunning eyes and slightly vulgar earrings help to read her nature. What about the groom, don’t you know?

Here his collar is raised on one side and lowered on the other. He doesn’t want to think sensibly next to his bride, who is bursting with youth.

But the artist endlessly pities this girl. The combination of her open gaze, folded arms and slightly clubbed legs tell us of extreme naivety and defenselessness.

Well, how can you not feel sorry for such a child!

Amedeo Modigliani. Girl in blue. 1918 Private collection

As you can see, each portrait is a whole world of a person. Reading their characters, we can even guess their fate. For example, the fate of Chaim Soutine.

Alas, although he will wait for recognition, he will be already very ill. His inability to take care of himself will lead him to stomach ulcers and extreme exhaustion.

And his experiences of being persecuted by the Nazis during the war would lead him to his grave.

But Amedeo will not know about this; he will die 20 years before his friend.

Modigliani's women

Modigliani was a very attractive man. Italian Jewish origin was charming and sociable. The women, of course, couldn't resist.

He had a lot of them. Among other things, he is credited with short novel with Anna Akhmatova.

She denied it until the end of her life. Many of Amedeo's drawings of her that were given to her simply disappeared. Because they were in nude style?

But some still survived. And based on them, we assume that these people had intimacy.

But main woman in Modigliani's life there was Jeanne Hebuterne. She was madly in love with him. He also had tender feelings for her. So tender that he was ready to get married.

He also painted several dozen portraits of her. And among them there is not a single Nu.

I call her Princess Rapunzel because she had very long and Thick hair. And as is usually the case with Modigliani, her portraits do not look very much like the real her. But her character is readable. Calm, reasonable, endlessly loving.

Left: Photo by Jeanne Hebuterne. Right: Portrait of a Girl (Jeanne Hebuterne) by Modigliani, 1917.

Amedeo, although he was the life of the party, behaved somewhat differently with close people. Booze and hashish are half the battle. He could have flared up while drunk.

Zhanna easily dealt with this, calming her angry lover with her words and gestures.

This is her last portrait. She is pregnant with her second child. Which, alas, was not destined to be born.

Amadeo Modigliani. Jeanne Hebuterne, sitting in front of the door. 1919

Returning from a cafe, drunk with friends, Modigliani unbuttoned his coat. And I caught a cold. His lungs, weakened by tuberculosis, could not stand it - he died the next day from meningitis.

And Zhanna was too young and in love. She didn't give herself time to recover from the loss. Unable to bear the eternal separation from Modigliani, she jumped out the window. Being nine months pregnant.

Their first daughter was taken in by Modigliani's sister. Growing up, she became her father's biographer.

Nude Modigliani

Amadeo Modigliani. Unfolding nude. 1917 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Most of the Nu Modigliani created in the period 1917-1918. It was an order from an art dealer. Such works sold well, especially after the artist’s death.

So most of them are still in private collections. We managed to find one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York).

See how the model's body is cut off by the edges of the painting at the elbows and knees. So the artist brings her very close to the viewer. She enters his personal space. Yes, it’s not surprising that such works sold well.

In 1917, an art dealer organized an exhibition of such nudes. But an hour later it was closed. Considering Modigliani's work indecent.

Amedeo Modigliani. Reclining nude. 1917 Private collection

What? And this was in 1918? When did everyone write nudes?

Yes, we wrote a lot. But ideal and abstract women. And this means the presence of one important detail– smooth armpits without hair. Yes, yes, this is exactly what confused the police.

Thus, the lack of hair removal turned out to be the main sign of whether a woman is a goddess or a real woman. Is it worthy of being shown to the public or out of sight.

Modigliani is unique even after death

Modigliani is the most copied artist in the world. For every original there are 3 fakes! This is a unique situation.

How did this happen?

But the latter maintained a thorough correspondence with his brother. It was from the letters that a complete catalog of Van Gogh's originals was compiled.

But Modigliani did not record his works. And he became famous on the day of his funeral. Unscrupulous art dealers took advantage of this, and an avalanche of fakes poured onto the market.

And there were several such waves, as soon as the prices for Modigliani’s paintings jumped again.

Unknown artist. Marie. Private collection (the painting was shown as a work by Modigliani at an exhibition in Genoa in 2017, during which it was found to be a fake)

In contact with

The artist Amedeo Modigliani, the founder of the realistic depiction of the nude, a talented sculptor, painter and freethinker, was an iconic figure of his time. However, during his lifetime the creator was famous not for his works, but for his dissolute lifestyle.

The beginning of the way

Amedeo Modigliani was born in Italy into a petty-bourgeois Jewish family. His parents had noble roots and gave their son a decent education. Since childhood, Amedeo grew up in an atmosphere saturated with the creativity of the Renaissance. Thanks to his mother, a native of France, he was well versed in poetry and philosophy, history and painting, and also mastered the French language, which would later help him live and work in Paris.

Before he came of age, Amedeo Modigliani was twice on the verge of death. First he fell ill with pleurisy, and then with typhus. Tormented by illness, in delirium he saw works Italian masters painting. This is what defined him life path. And already in 1898 he began to take lessons in private art school Guglielmo Micheli. But he was forced to interrupt his studies due to the illness that overcame him again. This time Amedeo contracted tuberculosis. After a short forced break future artist resumes his studies, but this time at the Free School of Nude Painting, and then at the Venetian Institute fine arts.

Paris: a new stage of creativity

Mother always admired her talent youngest son and contributed in every possible way to him creative development. So, in 1906, thanks to his mother, who raised money for her son, Amedeo went to Paris for inspiration and fame. Here he plunges into the creative atmosphere of Montmartre and meets many creators of that time - Picasso, Utrillo, Jacob, Meidner.

In the capital of world art, Amedeo Modigliani is constantly experiencing financial difficulties. His plight improved somewhat in 1907, when he met Paul Alexandre, a friendship with whom he would carry throughout his life. Alexander patronizes the artist - buys his works, organizes orders for portraits, as well as the first exhibition of Modigliani. However, fame and recognition still do not come.

Amedeo Modigliani devoted himself entirely to sculpture for some time. He works with stone blocks and marble. Brancusi, Epstein, Lipchitz had a great influence on Modigliani’s work during that period. In 1912, some of his works were even purchased. But poor health and worsening tuberculosis forced him to return to painting.

The artist continued to create during the First World War, to which he was not taken for health reasons. In 1917, an exhibition of Modigliani was opened, where he presented his works in the nude genre. However, local authorities recognized his works as indecent and literally a few hours after the opening they closed the exhibition.

Very little is known about the further period of the artist’s life. Amedeo Modigliani died in early 1920 from tuberculous meningitis that had taken over his life.

Love stories

The artist was distinguished by his ardent nature and amorousness. He admired feminine beauty, idolized and sang her praises. It is known that in 1910 he had an affair with Anna Akhmatova, which lasted a year and a half. In 1914, another serious romance happened in his life. The flamboyant and eccentric Beatrice Hastings was not only Amedeo's lover and muse, but also a promoter. Thanks to her scandalous articles about Modigliani, he gained some fame. True, not as a brilliant artist, but as a bohemian lover of alcohol and drugs.

After an affair with Beatrice, a young muse, nineteen-year-old Jeanne Hebuterne, bursts into the artist’s life. He glorified her beauty in 25 portraits. Jeanne gave birth to his child, and when the artist learned about the muse’s second pregnancy, he hastened to propose to her. But the couple never had time to get married in the church due to the death of the artist. Unable to withstand the separation, the day after the death of her lover, Zhanna decides to commit suicide.

Characteristics of creativity

Amedeo Modigliani, photos of whose works do not convey even a hundredth part of the artist’s skill, was skilled in creating portraits. He recreated through smooth lines and strokes. His works combine seemingly incompatible things - expression and harmony, linearity and generality, plasticity and dynamism. His portraits did not look like a reflection in a mirror or a photograph. Rather, they conveyed Modigliani’s inner feeling and were distinguished by elongated shapes and generalized color zones. He doesn't play with space. In the paintings it seems compressed, conditional.

Modigliani is a descendant of the great philosopher Spinoza.

“Modigliani. “Jew”—with these words the artist introduced himself to strangers. He was always confused by his nationality, but he chose the path not of denial, but of affirmation.

Amedeo had an heir, but he abandoned his son even before his birth.

The first surge in demand and sincere public interest in his work arose after the death of Modigliani, or rather, during his funeral.

V had a reputation as an irrepressible rowdy and reveler, and he was not allowed into all establishments.

Amedeo had He could quote poems of Renaissance poets and modern creators for hours on end.

In fact, contemporaries knew little about the life of Amedeo Modigliani. The biography was reconstructed after his death using his mother’s diaries, letters and stories from friends.

Amedeo (Iedidia) Clemente Modigliani (Italian: Amedeo Clemente Modigliani; July 12, 1884, Livorno, Kingdom of Italy - January 24, 1920, Paris, French Third Republic) - Italian artist and sculptor, one of the most famous artists late XIX- early 20th century, representative of expressionism.

Modigliani grew up in Italy, where he studied antique art and the work of the Renaissance masters, until he moved to Paris in 1906. In Paris, he met artists such as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuşi, who had a great influence on his work. Modigliani had poor health - he often suffered from lung diseases and died of tuberculous meningitis at the age of 35. The artist’s life is known only from a few reliable sources.

Modigliani's legacy consists mainly of paintings and sketches, but from 1909 to 1914 he was mainly engaged in sculptures. Both on canvas and in sculpture, Modigliani's main motif was man. In addition, several landscapes have been preserved; still lifes and genre paintings did not interest the artist. Modigliani often turned to the works of representatives of the Renaissance, as well as to African art, popular at that time. At the same time, Modigliani’s work cannot be attributed to any of the modern trends of that time, such as cubism or fauvism. Because of this, art historians consider Modigliani's work separately from the main trends of the time. During his lifetime, Modigliani’s works were not successful and became popular only after the artist’s death: at two Sotheby’s auctions in 2010, two paintings by Modigliani were sold for 60.6 and 68.9 million US dollars, and in 2015, “Reclining Nude” was sold at Christie's for $170.4 million.

Amedeo (Iedidia) Modigliani was born into a family of Sephardic Jews Flaminio Modigliani and Eugenia Garcin in Livorno (Tuscany, Italy). He was the youngest (fourth) of the children. His older brother, Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani (1872-1947, family name Meno), later a famous Italian anti-fascist politician. His mother's great-grandfather, Solomon Garcin, and his wife Regina Spinosa settled in Livorno in the 18th century (however, their son Giuseppe moved to Marseille in 1835); my father's family moved to Livorno from Rome to mid-19th century (the father himself was born in Rome in 1840). Flaminio Modigliani (son of Emanuele Modigliani and Olympia Della Rocca) was a mining engineer who supervised coal mines in Sardinia and managed nearly thirty acres of forest land that his family owned.

By the time Amedeo (family name Dedo) was born, the family’s affairs (trade in wood and coal) had fallen into disrepair; mother, born and raised in Marseille in 1855, had to earn a living by teaching French and translations, including works by Gabriele d'Annunzio. In 1886, his grandfather, Isaaco Garsen, who became impoverished and moved to his daughter from Marseille, settled in Modigliani’s house, and until his death in 1894 he was seriously involved in raising his grandchildren. His aunt Gabriela Garcin (who later committed suicide) also lived in the house and thus Amedeo was immersed in French from childhood, which later facilitated his integration in Paris. It is believed that it was the romantic nature of the mother that had a huge influence on the worldview of the young Modigliani. Her diary, which she began to keep shortly after Amedeo's birth, is one of the few documentary sources about the artist's life.

At the age of 11, Modigliani fell ill with pleurisy, and in 1898 with typhus, which was an incurable disease at that time. It has become turning point in his life. According to the stories of his mother, while lying in a feverish delirium, Modigliani raved about the masterpieces of Italian masters, and also recognized his destiny as an artist. After recovery, Amedeo's parents allowed Amedeo to leave school so that he could begin taking drawing and painting lessons at the Livorno Academy of Arts.

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Amedeo Clemente Modigliani - Italian artist and sculptor, one of the most famous artists of the late 19th - early 20th centuries, bright representative expressionism.

Biography of Amadeo Modigliani

« Human face- the highest creation of nature” - these words of the artist could become an epigraph to his work.

Modigliani Amedeo (1884-1920), Italian painter, sculptor, graphic artist, draftsman; belonged to the "Paris School". Modigliani was born in Livorno on July 12, 1884. He began to study the art of painting in 1898 in the workshop of the sculptor Gabriele Micheli. Since 1902, he studied at the “Free School of Drawing from Nude” at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, mainly with the painter Giovanni Fattori, whose name is in Italian painting associated with the "Macchiaioli" movement, which is related to the French "Tachisme". In 1903, having moved to Venice, Modigliani studied at the Free School of Nude at the Venice Institute of Fine Arts. From 1906 he settled in Paris, where he took lessons at the Colarossi Academy of Painting. In 1907, Modigliani first showed his works at the Autumn Salon, and from 1908 he exhibited at the Salon of Independents. In the Rotunda café on Montparnasse Boulevard, where writers and artists gathered, Modigliani was among friends who, like him, lived with the problems of art. During these years, the artist was keenly searching for his “soul line,” as he called creative search Modigliani is his friend, the poet Jean Cocteau. If the first works of the Parisian period were executed in a manner close to the graphics of Toulouse-Lautrec, then already in 1907 the artist discovered the paintings of Cezanne, met Pablo Picasso and for some time was influenced by these masters.

This is evidenced by the works of 1908-1909 (“Jewish Woman”, 1908, “Celloist”, 1909, both in a private collection, Paris).

Especially important role in the formation individual style Modigliani was also influenced by his passion for African sculpture, its crudely simple but expressive forms and clean silhouette lines.

At the same time, the art of his native Italy and, above all, Botticelli’s drawings, Trecento painting and the masterfully complex graphics of the Mannerists are the master’s sources of inspiration. Modigliani's complex talent was most fully revealed in the portrait genre.

“Man is what interests me. The human face is the highest creation of nature. For me this is an inexhaustible source,” writes Modigliani. Never making portraits to order, the artist painted only people whose fates he knew well; Modigliani seemed to be recreating his own image models.

In the sharply expressive portraits of Diego Rivera (1914, Art Museum, Sao Paulo), Pablo Picasso (1915, private collection, Geneva), Max Jacob (1916, private collection, Paris), Jean Cocteau (private collection, New York), Chaim Soutine (1917, National Gallery of Art, Washington) the artist precisely found the details, gesture, silhouette line, color dominants, the key to understanding the entire image - always a subtly captured characteristic “state of mind.”

Works of Amadeo Clemente Modigliani

Among other outstanding French masters of the early century, Modigliani seems most connected with the classical tradition.

He was not fascinated by the Cubists’ experiments with “pure” space and time; he did not, like the Fauvists, strive to embody the universal laws of life. For Modigliani, man was “a world that is sometimes worth many worlds,” and the human personality in its unique originality is the only source of images. But, unlike portrait painters of previous eras, he did not create a picturesque “mirror” of nature. It is characteristic that, always working from life, he did not so much “copy” its features as compare them with his inner vision. Using a refined stylization of the model’s appearance and abstract rhythms of lines and plastic masses, with the help of their expression, dynamic “shifts” and harmonious unity, Modigliani created his freely poetic, purely spiritual, sadness-covered images.

Most characteristic his style has a special role of line, however, in all his best works the artist sought harmony of line and color, a richness of values, united in generalized color zones.

The sculptural integrity of volumes is combined in his paintings with sculpted color, space seems pressed into the plane of the canvas, and the line not only outlines objects, but also connects spatial plans. In the general softness of Modigliani's style, in the light that fills his work, the Italian basis of his art is clearly perceptible.

Modigliani almost never painted bourgeois or wealthy clients.

His characters are ordinary people, maids, peasants, as well as the artists and poets around him. Each of the images is dictated by nature. Women are full of refined grace or folk energy, they look either arrogant or defenseless. In “Self-Portrait” the image embodies a restrained lyrical impulse, seeming to be filled with music from within. Modigliani portrays his friend and almost only “Marchand,” the poet L. Zborovsky, immersed in dreams, the expressionist artist X. Soutine as open and impulsive, and the more classical painter M. Kisling as stubborn and internally compressed. In the plastic solution of Max Jacob's portrait, sophistication is inseparable from modern syncopated rhythms... For all their uniqueness, these portraits bear the features of a single handwriting (almond-shaped or lake-like eyes, arrow-shaped noses, pursed lips, a predominance of oval and elongated shapes, etc.) and a single vision. In all of them one can feel compassion and tenderness for people, soft, contemplative and closed lyricism.

Modigliani does not seek to unravel the mystery of the identity of his heroes; on the contrary, each of his images reveals its own special secret and beauty.

Self-portrait Portrait of the poet Zborovsky Portrait of Chaim Soutine

An equally striking page of his work is the depiction of nudes. Compared to others' nudes modern masters, in particular A. Matisse, Modigliani’s “nudes” always seem individual and portrait-like. The more contrasting is the transformation of a nature full of immediate life into images, purified of everything empirical, filled with enlightened and timeless beauty. In these images, the concrete sensual principle is preserved, but it is “sublimated”, spiritualized, translated into the language of musically fluid lines and harmonies of rich ocher tones - light golden, reddish-red, dark brown.

An almost inexhaustible part of Modigliani’s heritage is drawings (portraits or “nude”), made in pencil, ink, ink, watercolor or pastel.

Drawing was, as it were, the artist’s way of existence; it embodied Modigliani’s inherent love of line, his constant thirst for creativity and his inexhaustible interest in people; He often used pencil sketches to pay for a cup of coffee or a plate of food. Created at once, without corrections, these drawings impress with their stylistic energy, figurative completeness, and precision of form.

Interesting Facts: Sex Life and Drama

Sex life

Modigliani loved women, and they loved him. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of women have been in the bed of this elegant handsome man.

Back at school, Amedeo noticed that girls paid special attention to him. Modigliani said that at the age of 15 he was seduced by a maid working in their house.

Although he, like many of his colleagues, was not averse to visiting brothels, the bulk of his mistresses were his models.

And during his career he changed hundreds of models. Many posed for him naked, interrupting several times during the session to make love.

Modigliani liked simple women most of all, for example, laundresses, peasant women, and waitresses.

These girls were terribly flattered by attention beautiful artist, and they obediently gave themselves to him.

Sexual partners

Despite his many sexual partners, Modigliani loved only two women in his life.

The first was Beatrice Hastings, an English aristocrat, poetess, five years old older than the artist. They met in 1914 and immediately became inseparable lovers.

They drank together, had fun and often fought. Modigliani, in a rage, could drag her by the hair along the sidewalk if he suspected her of attention to other men.

But despite all these dirty scenes, it was Beatrice who was his main source of inspiration. During the heyday of their love, Modigliani created his best works. Still, this stormy romance could not last long. In 1916, Beatrice ran away from Modigliani. Since then they have not seen each other again.

The artist grieved for his unfaithful girlfriend, but not for long.

In July 1917, Modigliani met 19-year-old Jeanne Hebuterne.

The young student came from French family Catholics. The delicate, pale girl and the artist settled together, despite the resistance of Jeanne’s parents, who did not want a Jewish son-in-law. Jeanne not only served as a model for the artist’s works, she went through with him years of serious illness, periods of rudeness and outright rowdy.

In November 1918, Jeanne gave birth to Modigliani’s daughter, and in July 1919 he proposed marriage to her “as soon as all the papers arrive.”

Why they never got married remains a mystery, since these two were, as they say, made for each other and remained together until his death 6 months later.

When Modigliani lay dying in Paris, he invited Jeanne to join him in death, “so that I could be with my beloved model in paradise and enjoy eternal bliss with her.”

On the day of the artist’s funeral, Zhanna was on the verge of despair, but did not cry, but was only silent the whole time.

Pregnant with their second child, she threw herself from the fifth floor to her death.

A year later, at the insistence of the Modigliani family, they were united under one gravestone. The second inscription on it read:

Jeanne Hebuterne. Born in Paris in April 1898. Died in Paris on January 25, 1920. Faithful companion of Amedeo Modigliani, who did not want to survive separation from him.

Modigliani and Anna Akhmatova

A. A. Akhmatova met Amedeo Modigliani in 1910 in Paris, during her honeymoon.

Her acquaintance with A. Modigliani continued in 1911, at which time the artist created 16 drawings - portraits of A. A. Akhmatova. In her essay on Amedeo Modigliani she wrote:

In 10, I saw him extremely rarely, only a few times. Nevertheless, he wrote to me all winter. (I remember several phrases from his letters, one of them: Vous etes en moi comme une hantise / You are like an obsession in me). He didn’t tell me that he wrote poetry.

As I now understand, what struck him most about me was my ability to guess thoughts, see other people’s dreams and other little things that those who know me have long been accustomed to.

At this time, Modigliani was raving about Egypt. He took me to the Louvre to see the Egyptian section and assured me that everything else was unworthy of attention. He painted my head in the attire of Egyptian queens and dancers and seemed completely captivated by the great art of Egypt. Apparently Egypt was his latest hobby. Soon he becomes so original that you don’t want to remember anything when looking at his canvases.

He didn’t draw me from life, but at his home—he gave these drawings to me. There were sixteen of them. He asked me to frame them and hang them in my room. They died in a Tsarskoye Selo house in the first years of the revolution. Only one survived, and, unfortunately, there is less foreshadowing of his future in him than in the others.”

Bibliography and filmography

Literature

• Parisot K. “Modigliani”, M., Text, 2008.
• Vilenkin V.V. “Amedeo Modigliani”, M. 1970.

Filmography

• In 1957, the Frenchman Jacques Becker directed the film "Montparnasse 19" ("The Lovers of Montparnasse") with Gérard Philippe in the title role.
• In 2004, Briton Mick Davis directed the film Modigliani. main role played by Andy Garcia.

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His first name means "beloved of God", but Amedeo's life Modigliani was not blessed. Today, portraits and sculptures by Modigliani adorn the collections of the world's main museums; he is one of the most famous artists of the 20th century. Modigliani is loved, his paintings are worth millions. The artist who worked for eternity is not forgotten. But his life was spent in poverty and suffering, and its ending became a real tragedy.

Amedeo Modigliani. Self-portrait, 1919

Handsome, charismatic, consumptive, and unhappy, Modigliani was the embodiment of the Parisian artist, living his life in a haze of hashish and alcohol. German artist Ludwig Meidner called him "the last true representative of bohemianism." When he died at 35, his pregnant mistress jumped out of a window, killing herself, her unborn child, and leaving their baby daughter orphan.

“Modigliani’s canvases will tell you a lot future generations. And I look, and in front of me is a friend of my distant youth. How much love he had for people, how much concern for them! They write and write: “he drank, he was rowdy, he died.” That’s not the point. It’s not even a matter of his fate, which is edifying, like an ancient parable...”

Ilya Erenburg

Trouble Begins

Modigliani was born in 1884 in the Italian town of Livorno, near Pisa. He was the fourth and most youngest child in the family of Flaminio Modigliani, a coal and wood merchant. The future artist was unlucky right away - in the year of his birth, his father went bankrupt.

At the age of 11, Modigliani fell ill with pleurisy, and in 1898 with typhus, which at that time was considered incurable. He recovered, but it was this illness that changed his life forever. According to the stories of his mother, while lying in a feverish delirium, Modigliani raved about the masterpieces of Italian masters and recognized his destiny to become an artist. After recovery, Amedeo's parents allowed him to leave school so that he could begin taking drawing and painting lessons at the Livorno Academy of Arts.

As a child, he was also diagnosed with tuberculosis, which eventually killed him. And yet he was a real handsome man and managed to achieve his short life break a lot of hearts.

Modigliani studied painting in his native Livorno, in Florence and at the Venice Institute of Arts. In 1906, when he was twenty-two, Amedeo, with a small amount of money that his mother was able to raise for him, moved to Paris, which he had dreamed of for several years. At first he settled in a decent hotel, but very soon he moved to a tiny room in Montmartre.

The city made him poor, hungry, unhappy - and gave him inspiration. In the first years, he worked almost around the clock, drawing up to 150 sketches a day.

“Paris inspires me,” Modigliani wrote, “I am unhappy in Paris, but what is true is true - I can only work here.”

It was here that four years later he would meet a Russian poetess named Anna.

Modigliani, artist and Jew

“Modigliani, artist and Jew” - this is how Amedeo introduced himself to Anna Akhmatova in 1910. She said that their first meeting was like “the sting of a ringing wasp,” and many years later she wrote in an essay about the artist: “I knew that such a person should shine.”

They read poems by French poets to each other, went to the Louvre to see the Egyptian section, and walked around Paris at night. Modigliani drew pencil portraits of Anna Andreevna, and a gray-eyed man appeared in Akhmatova’s poems of 1910 and 1911 lyrical hero. There is even a version that the famous Gray-Eyed King himself is none other than Modigliani.

Anna Akhmatova in Modigliani's drawing

They were not destined to be together for long. Akhmatova had to return to her husband in Russia. The lovers parted forever.

For four years from 1910, Modi was engaged mainly in sculpture, only occasionally returning to painting, but with the outbreak of war, new construction in Paris ceased, and it was almost impossible to get stone.

Modigliani's final turn to painting coincides with a new novel - with Beatrice Hastings, a bisexual British journalist. They spent two very tumultuous years together before she left him, unable to watch him destroy himself with binge drinking.

Amedeo Modigliani. Portrait of Beatrice Hastings

Beatrice was a very extraordinary woman - a bright intellectual, sarcastic and independent. Details of their romance, found in descriptions of contemporaries, include violent quarrels and even fights.

When Hastings left, Modigliani became involved with the tender young Simone Theroux, who bore him a son, but Amedeo refused to recognize him as hers.

The Last Muse and Shakespeare's Finale

In April 1917, Modigliani met nineteen-year-old student Jeanne Hebuterne. Blue eyes and pigtails, 'she was basically pregnant most the time they lived together." Her parents were horrified that her chosen one was a poor alcoholic and drug addict, and also a Jew - and disowned their daughter.

Amedeo Modigliani. Portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne

Modigliani dedicated the most works to Jeanne Hébuterne, and it is her face that we will most likely remember when we talk about portraits by the “last bohemian artist of Paris.” Unfortunately, the girl’s love could no longer save Amedeo, although it inspired him to create many masterpieces.

Photographs of Jeanne Hebuterne and her portraits by Modigliani

By the time he met his last muse, Modigliani had already been a binge alcoholic for many years, starting his morning with a glass or pipe of hashish. They lived very poorly: the artist’s paintings were almost never sold. Part of the reason for this was his exceptionally bad character. The audience's lack of understanding infuriated Modigliani (“Why are there eyes without pupils?” they asked. “Why such huge necks?”). But he managed to scare off even those few collectors who were interested in his paintings with his outright rudeness.

There is a well-known story about how one rich young lady bought a Modigliani drawing and discovered that it was not signed. The girl approached the artist in a cafe and asked him to sign the work. But Modigliani was not in a good mood. He took a pen and wrote his name over the drawing, ruining it and frightening the customer.

The artist died penniless in a charity hospital from tuberculous meningitis. His pregnant wife jumped out of the window. Their one-year-old daughter was left an orphan. The girl, also named Jeanne, was adopted by Modigliani's sister. But that was all that was left in the family from genius artist: he exchanged every sketch, every painting for food, alcohol and rent.

But rumors of a tragedy in the spirit of Shakespeare instantly spread across Paris, collectors began hunting for the artist’s paintings, and the portraits he painted became famous. Now they belong to art dealers, who sell them at steadily rising prices. In 2015, a Modigliani painting was sold for a record $170 million at Christie’s.

All her life Jeanne studied her father, his fate, drawings and paintings. The result of her work is great biography"Modigliani: man and myth."

Based on materials: tanjand.livejourna, modernartconsulting, booknik