Amedeo Modigliani facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Amedeo Modigliani
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Amedeo Modigliani
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| Born |
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani
12 July 1884 |
| Died | 24 January 1920 (aged 35) |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Education | Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence |
| Known for | Painting, sculpture |
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Notable work
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Redheaded Girl in Evening Dress Madame Pompadour Jeanne Hébuterne in Red Shawl |
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (12 July 1884 – 24 January 1920) was an Italian Jewish painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits in a modern style characterized by long faces, necks, and figures that were not received well during his lifetime but later found acceptance.
Biography
Modigliani was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno, Italy. A port city, Livorno had long served as a refuge for those persecuted for their religion, and was home to a large Jewish community. His maternal great-great-grandfather, Solomon Garsin, had immigrated to Livorno in the 18th century as a refugee.
Modigliani's mother, Eugénie Garsin, born and raised in Marseille, was descended from an intellectual, scholarly family of Sephardic ancestry that for generations had lived along the Mediterranean coastline. Fluent in many languages, her ancestors were authorities on sacred Jewish texts and had founded a school of Talmudic studies. Family legend traced the family lineage to the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The family business was money lending, with branches in Livorno, Marseille, Tunis, and London, though their fortunes ebbed and flowed.
Modigliani's father, Flaminio, was a member of an Italian Jewish family of successful businessmen and entrepreneurs. While not as culturally sophisticated as the Garsins, they knew how to invest in and develop thriving business endeavors. When the Garsin and Modigliani families announced the engagement of their children, Flaminio was a wealthy young mining engineer. He managed the mine in Sardinia and also managed the almost 30,000 acres (12,141 ha) of timberland the family owned.
A reversal in fortune occurred to this prosperous family in 1883. An economic downturn in the price of metal plunged the Modiglianis into bankruptcy. Ever resourceful, Modigliani's mother used her social contacts to establish a school and, along with her two sisters, made the school into a successful enterprise.
Amedeo Modigliani was the fourth child, whose birth coincided with the disastrous financial collapse of his father's business interests. Amedeo's birth saved the family from ruin; according to an ancient law, creditors could not seize the bed of a pregnant woman or a mother with a newborn child. The bailiffs entered the family's home just as Eugénie went into labour; the family protected their most valuable assets by piling them on top of her.
Modigliani had a close relationship with his mother, who taught him at home until he was 10. Beset with health problems after an attack of pleurisy when he was about 11, a few years later he developed a case of typhoid fever. When he was 16 he was taken ill again and contracted the tuberculosis which would later claim his life. After Modigliani recovered from the second bout of pleurisy, his mother took him on a tour of southern Italy: Naples, Capri, Rome and Amalfi, then north to Florence and Venice.
His mother was, in many ways, instrumental in his ability to pursue art as a vocation. When he was 11 years of age, she had noted in her diary: "The child's character is still so unformed that I cannot say what I think of it. He behaves like a spoiled child, but he does not lack intelligence. We shall have to wait and see what is inside this chrysalis. Perhaps an artist?"
Modigliani is known to have drawn and painted from a very early age, and thought himself "already a painter", his mother wrote, even before beginning formal studies. Despite her misgivings that launching him on a course of studying art would impinge upon his other studies, his mother indulged the young Modigliani's passion for the subject.
At the age of fourteen, while sick with typhoid fever, he raved in his delirium that he wanted, above all else, to see the paintings in the Palazzo Pitti and the Uffizi in Florence. As Livorno's local museum housed only a sparse few paintings by the Italian Renaissance masters, the tales he had heard about the great works held in Florence intrigued him, and it was a source of considerable despair to him, in his sickened state, that he might never get the chance to view them in person. His mother promised that she would take him to Florence herself, the moment he was recovered. Not only did she fulfil this promise, but she also undertook to enroll him with the best painting master in Livorno, Guglielmo Micheli.
Modigliani worked in Micheli's Art School from 1898 to 1900. Among his colleagues in that studio would have been Llewelyn Lloyd, Giulio Cesare Vinzio, Manlio Martinelli, Gino Romiti, Renato Natali, and Oscar Ghiglia.
Here his earliest formal artistic instruction took place in an atmosphere full of the study of the styles and themes of 19th-century Italian art. In his earliest Parisian work, traces of this influence, and that of his studies of Renaissance art, can still be seen.
In 1906 he moved to Paris, where he came into contact with such artists as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. By 1912 Modigliani was exhibiting highly stylized sculptures with Cubists of the Section d'Or group at the Salon d'Automne.
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. However, many of his works were lost or destroyed or left behind in his frequent changes of address, or given to girlfriends who did not keep them.
Modigliani's work includes paintings and drawings. From 1909 to 1914 he devoted himself mainly to sculpture. His main subject was portraits and full figures, both in the images and in the sculptures.
At the outset of World War I, Modigliani tried to enlist in the army but was refused because of his poor health.
He had little success while alive, but after his death achieved great popularity. Since his death, Modigliani's reputation has soared. Nine novels, a play, a documentary, and three feature films have been devoted to his life.
Jeanne Hébuterne
In the spring of 1917, the Russian sculptor Chana Orloff introduced him to a 19-year-old art student named Jeanne Hébuterne who had posed for Tsuguharu Foujita. From a conservative bourgeois background, Hébuterne was renounced by her devout Roman Catholic family for her relationship with Modigliani. Despite her family's objections, soon they were living together.
Jeanne began to pose for him and appears in several of his paintings. Jeanne Hébuterne became a principal subject for Modigliani's art.
Towards the end of the First World War, early in 1918, Modigliani left Paris with Hébuterne to escape from the war and travelled to Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer. They would spend a year in France. During that time they had a busy social life with many friends, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico and André Derain.
After he and Hébuterne moved to Nice on 29 November 1918, she gave birth to a daughter whom they named Jeanne (1918–1984). In May 1919 they returned to Paris with their infant daughter and moved into an apartment on the rue de la Grande Chaumière.
Hébuterne became pregnant again. Modigliani then got engaged to her, but Jeanne's parents were against the marriage. However, Modigliani officially recognized her daughter as his child. The wedding plans were shattered independently of Jeanne's parents' resistance when Modigliani discovered he had a severe form of tuberculosis.
Death
Modigliani died on January 24, 1920, at the Hôpital de la Charité of tubercular meningitis, at the age of 35, in Paris. There was an enormous funeral, attended by many from the artistic communities in Montmartre and Montparnasse.
Images for kids
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Modigliani's birthplace in Livorno
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Portrait of Pablo Picasso, 1915, private collection
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His home in Venice.
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Portrait of Chaïm Soutine, 1916
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Portrait of Juan Gris, 1915
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Le Bateau-Lavoir in 1910
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Four sculptures by Modigliani exhibited at the 1912 Salon d'Automne along with the Cubists
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Female Head, 1911/1912, Tate
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Modigliani, Pablo Picasso and André Salmon, 1916
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Portrait of Léopold Zborowski, 1918
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Modigliani in 1919, near the end of his life
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Grave of Modigliani and Hébuterne in Père Lachaise Cemetery
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Alice, c. 1918, Danish National Gallery
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Portrait of Maude Abrantes, 1907, Hecht Museum
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Paul Guillaume, Novo Pilota, 1915, Musée de l'Orangerie
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Bride and Groom, 1915
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Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz, 1916
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Léon Indenbaum, 1916, Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum
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Portrait of Beatrice Hastings, 1916
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Portrait of Moise Kisling, 1915
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Madame Kisling, 1917
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Portrait of the Artist's Wife (Jeanne Hébuterne), 1918
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Jeanne Hébuterne with Yellow Sweater, 1918
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Dedie Hayden, 1918, Centre Georges Pompidou
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Gypsy Woman with Baby, 1919, National Gallery of Art
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The Little Peasant, 1918, Tate Liverpool
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Portrait of a Young Woman, 1918, New Orleans Museum of Art
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Buste de femme, unknown, before 1919, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires)
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Beatrice Hastings, 1916–1919, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
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Woman with a Fan, 1919, stolen from Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
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Portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne, Seated, 1918, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
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Portrait of Blaise Cendrars, 1917, Galleria Sabauda, Turin
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See also
In Spanish: Amedeo Modigliani para niños
