Amedeo Modigliani
The painter of long faces.
Amedeo Modigliani painted portraits and nudes with elongated faces and almond-shaped eyes. He died in Paris at the age of 35.
Amedeo Modigliani was born in 1884 in Livorno in Italy into a Jewish family. As a child and teenager he suffered serious illnesses, including pleurisy and tuberculosis. He studied art in Livorno, Florence and Venice, where he learned from the traditions of the Renaissance and of Italian art.
In 1906 he moved to Paris. He lived first in Montmartre and later in Montparnasse, where he mixed with artists such as Picasso, Chaim Soutine and Constantin Brâncuși. He lived in poverty and at times hard, with much alcohol and drugs, and became a symbol of bohemian life in Paris.
In the years around 1909–1914 he devoted himself mainly to sculpture. Inspired by Brâncuși and by African and ancient art, he carved long, narrow heads in limestone. He had to stop, probably for both financial and health reasons, as the stone dust was dangerous for his lungs.
He returned to painting and painted portraits of friends, art dealers and women close to him. Typical features are elongated faces, long necks, almond-shaped eyes that often lack pupils and warm, glowing colours. His reclining female nudes were shown at an exhibition in Paris in 1917, but the police closed it the same day because the pictures were considered indecent. Among those he portrayed was also the Swede Thora Klinckowström.
From 1917 he lived with the art student Jeanne Hébuterne, and they had a daughter. Modigliani died of tuberculosis in January 1920, aged 35. The following day Jeanne, who was pregnant again, took her own life. In his lifetime he sold works for small sums. Today his paintings are among the most expensive in the world.