Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani painted the faces of Montparnasse: long necks, tilted heads, almond eyes often left blank, a style recognizable at a glance and belonging to no school. Born in Livorno in 1884 and in Paris from 1906, he worked fourteen years, held one solo exhibition, and died of tubercular meningitis in January 1920, at thirty-five. Two days later his partner Jeanne Hébuterne, pregnant with their second child, died by suicide. The legend of the cursed bohemian was assembled from those facts almost immediately. The record underneath is of a disciplined portraitist whose sitters were the artists and dealers of his own quarter.

Livorno to Montparnasse

Modigliani was born on 12 July 1884 in the Tuscan port of Livorno, the youngest child of a Sephardic Jewish family — his father Flaminio's businesses had collapsed the year before, and his mother Eugénie Garsin ran a school and kept the household. His childhood was punctuated by illness: pleurisy at eleven, typhoid at fourteen, and at sixteen the tuberculosis that would kill him. He trained under the Livorno painter Guglielmo Micheli from 1898, then at the academies of Florence in 1902 and Venice in 1903.[1]

He arrived in Paris in 1906, at twenty-two, and settled in Montmartre in the orbit of the Bateau-Lavoir, the tenement studio building where Pablo Picasso worked. Within a few years he had crossed the river to Montparnasse, and from about 1911 he was a fixture at La Rotonde, Père Libion's café on the boulevard du Montparnasse, where he sketched portraits at the tables and traded drawings for coins, a meal, or a drink. The Rotonde's walls filled with Modiglianis.[2]

The sculpture years

In 1909, through his early patron Paul Alexandre, Modigliani met the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, and for the next five years sculpture came first. Working in the studios of the Cité Falguière in Montparnasse, he carved a series of elongated stone heads whose simplified forms carry Brâncuși's influence alongside the African and archaic sculpture both men studied. A group of the heads was shown at the Salon d'Automne of 1912.[3]

By 1914 he had abandoned carving: the physical demands of the work were more than his health could sustain. Roughly twenty-five sculptures survive. The long necks and pared-down faces of the stone heads carried over directly into the paintings that occupied the rest of his life.[1]

Portraits and dealers

The poet Max Jacob introduced Modigliani to Paul Guillaume in 1914. Guillaume, then just starting out as a dealer, rented him a studio in Montmartre and became the first to handle his work seriously; Modigliani painted him four times in 1915 and 1916, once with the inscription Novo Pilota — 'new helmsman.' In the same period he lived for nearly two years with the English writer Beatrice Hastings, whom he painted repeatedly. From 1916 his principal dealer was the Polish poet Léopold Zborowski, who paid him a stipend, commissioned the series of nudes he painted between 1916 and 1919, and supported him for the rest of his life.[4][5]

His sitters were the quarter itself. The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz introduced him to Chaïm Soutine at the Cité Falguière; Modigliani painted Soutine's portrait — the National Gallery of Art dates its canvas 1918 — and pressed Zborowski to take the younger painter on. He painted Jean Cocteau in 1916, in Moïse Kisling's Montparnasse studio; Cocteau paid for the portrait but left it behind.[6][7]

Many of the portraits leave the eyes blank, a flat almond of color with no pupil. In Nice in 1918 the painter Léopold Survage asked why his freshly finished portrait had only one seeing eye; Modigliani, as Survage recalled it, answered that with one eye you look at the outside world, and with the other you look into yourself.

He had exactly one solo exhibition in his lifetime. Zborowski arranged it at Berthe Weill's gallery, 3–30 December 1917, and it opened to a police summons: nudes hung in the gallery window drew a crowd, and Weill was ordered to take them down on grounds of indecency. The show went on with the window cleared, and sales were negligible.

Jeanne Hébuterne and Nice

In the spring of 1917 the sculptor Chana Orloff introduced Modigliani to Jeanne Hébuterne, a nineteen-year-old art student at the Académie Colarossi. She became his companion and his most frequent sitter; he painted her more than twenty times, the long neck and tilted head of his late style largely worked out on her face.

In 1918, with the German army again threatening Paris and his health poor, the couple went south with Zborowski's circle, staying in Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer while the dealer tried to sell the work. Their daughter, Jeanne Modigliani, was born in Nice on 29 November 1918. The family returned to Paris in May 1919; Hébuterne was soon pregnant again, and Modigliani signed a promise of marriage that was never carried out.

January 1920

Modigliani had concealed his tuberculosis since Livorno. His biographer Meryle Secrest argues that the famous drinking was, at least in part, cover — consumption carried a stigma severe enough to mean isolation, and a man seen drunk was not suspected of being contagious — and that alcohol and laudanum also served to suppress the symptoms. By the winter of 1919–20 the disease had reached his brain. He died of tubercular meningitis at the Hôpital de la Charité on 24 January 1920, aged thirty-five. The funeral, paid for by a collection among his friends, drew an enormous crowd from the artistic communities of Montmartre and Montparnasse, and he was buried at Père Lachaise, in division 96.[1]

Jeanne Hébuterne, eight months pregnant with their second child, was taken to her parents' apartment at 8 bis rue Amyot, in the fifth arrondissement. In the early hours of 26 January 1920, two days after Modigliani's death, she died by suicide, jumping from the apartment's fifth-floor window. She was twenty-one. Her family buried her at the Cimetière de Bagneux, outside the city; in 1930 they allowed her remains to be transferred to Père Lachaise, beside Modigliani.

The shared stone gives each of them a line in Italian: for him, struck down by death at the moment of glory; for her, devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice. Their daughter Jeanne, raised by Modigliani's family in Italy, became an art historian and wrote a biography of the father she never knew.[8]