Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian
Self-Portrait as Pierrot, oil on board, 1915.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920. Italian active France. Loan to the Barnes Foundation in 2022/3 by the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Dr. Alfred Barnes (1872-1951), who left metropolitan Philadelphia one of the largest private collections of French modernism,
began buying Amedeo Modigliani‘s paintings in 1922 from the artist’s first dealer, Paul Guillaume. The Barnes contains 16 of the artist’s works.
Portrait of Paul Guillaume, 1915, oil on board.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loan to the Barnes Foundation in 2022/3 by the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio
In the same year, Dr. Barnes created his Foundation in a suburb of Philadelphia.
To mark both, the Barnes Foundation has held an exhibition of the paintings of Amedeo Modigliani.
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He whom the gods love, die young. Menander, died 290 BCE.
Modigliani died in Paris in 1920 at the age of 35 of tubercular meningitis aggravated by alcoholism.
His lover, Jeanne Hébuterne the mother of his daughter, died at the same time with their unborn child. He left more than 20 portraits of her.
Jeanne Hébuterne, 1919, oil on canvas
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
A sickly child, at 16 he contracted the tuberculosis which killed him at 35.
The effect on the whole tenor of his life of a fatal prognosis at a time when most young people think that they are going to live forever can barely be imagined.
It was not the gods alone who loved Modigliani.
His funeral cortege was accompanied by a very large crowd.
The rabbi prayed (he was born to a Jewish Sephardic family in Livorno) at his grave.
Then his fellow artists – now the giants of European modernism – paid their respects to him: Picasso, Fernand Leger, Chaim Soutine, Brancusi, Gino Severini, Maurice Utrillo, Andre Derain, Jacques Lipchitz.
Modigliani’s work did not reach popular and critical approval until after he died.
He had begun to paint as a teenager in Livorno. He had steeped himself in the work of his native civilization at the Uffizi, Florence and also in Venice.
Modigliani kept this tradition with him always in the physical form of a representation of a painting by the Renaissance master, Vittore Carpaccio.
This he tacked to the wall of each of the many rented rooms in which he lived for all of his French years.
Two Venetian Ladies (formerly Two Courtesans, part of a painting cut into quarters), oil on panel; 1490-95.
Vittore Carpaccio, c. 1460/66-c.1525/26, Venetian. Museo Correr, Venice from whose website this photo
Paris, 1906
When he reached Paris he joined an impoverished and lively group of painters and sculptors. He steeped himself in French Modernism.
He revered Cézanne and carried with him and kissed a representation of ‘The Boy in a Red Vest’ whenever Cézanne’s name came up in conversation.
Boy in a Red Vest, 1888-90, oil on canvas.
Paul Cézanne, 1839-1906, French, MOMA, NY
The artist made four paintings and two watercolours of this Italian boy posing in a red vest.
Modigliani chose not to join any of the tendencies of Modernism whose development he was witnessing.
His only tendency, he said, was Modigliani!
He chose portraiture as the field in which he would evolve his own style.
Famously, his articulation of his aim for his portraits was:
“What I am searching for is neither the real nor the unreal, but the subconscious, the mystery of what is instinctive in the human race.”
His earliest portraits were conventional even if set in a modernist colour palette and moving already towards the elongated neck.
Portrait of Maude Abrantes, 1907, oil on canvas; (on the other side of the painting below)
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920. Italian active France. Loan to the Barnes Foundation by the Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, in 2022/3
Nude with Hat, 1907; oil on canvas; (one side of the painting above).
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920. Italian active France. Loan to the Barnes Foundation by the Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, in 2022/3
The Amazon, 1909, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920. Italian active France. Loan to the Barnes Foundation from a private collection in 2022/3.
The artist’s first patron was Paul Alexandre. Baroness Marguerite de Hasse de Villers was the mistress of this man’s younger brother.
Paul Alexandre in Front of a Window, 1913, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920. Italian active France. Loan to the Barnes Foundation in 2022/3 by the Musee de Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France
Scultpure, 1909-1913
Modigliani met Constantin Brancusi in 1909 and studied with him for a year.
A view of a gallery of the Barnes during this exhibition
In the next 3 years, rejecting clay modelling, Modigliani created at least 25 sculptures of directly carved stone, allowing inherent shapes to emerge.
His primary influence was Brancusi. Other influences included Paul Gaugin, African and Asian art, Cycladic and ancient Greek art.
Head, c. 1911, limestone.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loaned to the Barnes Foundation in 2022/3 by the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA
Woman’s Head, 1912, limestone.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Modigliani’s sculpture, displayed at the 1912 Salon d’Automne, received no takers.
His health, always frail and endangered further by limestone dust, and his need to alleviate his grinding poverty turned the artist back to painting.
A painting style which, however, showed the influence of the artist’s experience with carving stone.
His portraits adopted a protracted vertical form humanized, as it were, by arcs of sensuous curves and expanses of variegated colour.
Woman’s Head, 1912, limestone.
Set at right-angles: Lola de Valance, oil on paper, mounted on wood, 1915.
Both: Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Nudes
Modigliani’s painting took on simpler lines in his effort to get at the essence of the person painted.
After 1916, he was much helped by the support of the Polish art dealer, Leopold Zborowski (1889-1932).
Leopold Zborowski, 1919, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920. Italian active France. Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
Madame Zborowska, 1918, oil on canvas
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Tate, London loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3
Madame Hanka Zborowska Leaning on a Chair, 1919, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920. Italian active France. Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
Zborowski exchanged a small monthly allowance, and a room, food, coal for heating, art materials and studio space for a regular tranche of the artist’s work.
The art dealer’s encouragement and payments for models resulted in Modigliani’s most celebrated works: his nudes.
Nude, 1917, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY in 2022/3
Seated Nude with Shirt, 1917, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia by the Lille Metropole Musee d’Art Moderne, d’Art Contemporain et d’Art Brut, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France in 2022/3
Nude on a Blue Cushion 1917, oil on linen
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. National Gallery, Washington, DC
The artist painted a total of 22 reclining nudes and 13 seated nudes between 1916 and 1919.
Most were completed in 1917 in which year police, scandalized by the presence of body hair, closed down the only solo exhibition organized in his lifetime.
Nude with Coral Necklace, 1917, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3 by the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, OH
Art professionals deem these nudes to have revolutionized the painting of the nude.
They are openly sensual, frank, unafraid; and without any supporting religious or mythological subtext.
Standing Nude (Elvira), c. 1918, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3
Reclining Nude, 1919, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. MOMA, NY loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3
Portraits
Modigliani’s work did not reach popular and critical approval until after he died. Its popularity has not waned.
Why this is the case is always up for debate.
There is first sympathy with the circumstances of the artist’s life.
Very poor for all of his adult life, the quintessential image of the struggling artist, terminally ill, living on borrowed time, consumed by anxiety, drugs and alcohol; handsome, promiscuous, histrionic, mercurial, fragile, passionate; and very gifted.
Pink Nude, 1914-15, watercolour and opaque watercolour, blue crayon or pencil, and graphite on blue laid paper.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920,Italian active France, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia from whose webside this image.
The artist painted many caryatids.
There is the work itself.
The artist’s work is figurative;
but in his portraits, he has abstracted certain parts of the human body and uses these abstractions consistently.
Face shapes are almost always oval. Eyes tend towards slits. Ears, where seen, are small and non-protruding. Lips, parted or not, are small and heart-shaped. Necks and torsos are elongated. Hands tend towards paw-like.
Antonia, oil on canvas, 1915
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Musee de l’Orangerie loan to the Barnes Foundation in 2022/3
It is, nevertheless the case, that Modigliani’s portraits are of real people and recognized as such.
The Pretty Housewife, oil on canvas, 1915
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
Portrait of Pierre Reverdy, 1915, oil on canvas, and detail.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Private collection on loan to the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2017
Each portrait is of a known person (some are anonymous now but were known to the artist).
The identifying features of these sitters are portrayed conventionally: their body size, their hair, their eyebrows (sometimes); certain attributes which signal their gender and, sometimes, their role in the world, and the disposition of their body on the canvas.
These are conventional portraits which include a significant number of abstract elements which made them novel but which did not distort or hide the identity and character of the subject.
Beatrice, 1916, oil with newsprint on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
That these are ‘real’ people is probably at the root of his public acclaim.
We don’t have to struggle with Cubist deformations of the human form or with the energetic figurative, Expressionist explosions of Modigliani’s close friend, Chaim Soutine. Or with Fauvist colours screaming off the canvas.
Here are dignified, everyday people, thoughtful and interior -as in a Mannerist tableau – paused for a moment to allow the painter to paint.
Seated Servant,1916, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Private collection loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3
In the last few decades, art professionals have expanded public understanding of the artist’s techniques.
Modigliani did not use the standard size canvases conventional in France for portraits. He used anything which came to hand.
Anything which came to hand included canvases already worked by other artists over which he painted and sometimes repainted his work. He used canvases on which blue ground had already been painted and he used that blue ground to deepen the colour of flesh.
He worked the colours he found into his own work in ways which are resourceful.
He painted and repainted his own work on the same canvas. French conservators found 8 separate paintings below the surface of ‘Antonia’, a work in wartime.
The limestone he used for his sculptures was harvested from building sites and contain anomalies.
Madame Kisling, c. 1917, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Girl in a Green Blouse, 1917, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Chaim Soutine, 1917, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
This technical review cannot but leave you with admiration for the artist’s achievement with such constrained resources.
Woman with Red Hair, 1917, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Adrienne (Woman with Bangs), 1917, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Leon Bakst, 1917, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Modigliani’s colours – always warm – became brighter when in 1918, with Paris under German bombardment, Zborowski took himself, his family and a group of artists including Modigliani and his lover to Provence for almost a year.
Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne,1918, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne, 1918, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Private collection loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3
Portrait of a Young Woman, 1918, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loaned to The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3 by Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
Details of Elvira Resting at a Table, c. 1918-19, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loaned to The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3 by the Saint Louis Art Museum
The Yellow Sweater, 1918-19, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Solomon R. Guggenheim, NY
Black Hair (Young Dark Haired Girl), 1918, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3 by the Musee National Picasso, Paris
Portrait of Germaine Survage, 2018, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3 by the Musee de Beaux Arts, Nancy, France
Portrait of the Red-Headed Woman, 1918, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
Young Woman in a Yellow Dress (Renee Modot), 1918, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loaned by the Collezione Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti per L’Arte to the Barnes Foundation in 2022/3
The Young Apprentice, c. 1918/19; oil on canvas
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loaned by the Musee de l’Orangerie, Paris to the Barnes Foundation in 2022/3
The Boy, 1919?, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3 by the Indianapolis Museum of Art
Young Girl with Loose Hair, 1919, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Private loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3
Portrait of Thora Klinckowstrom, 1919, oil on canvas. Photo from the net
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920. Italian active France. Loaned to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3 by the heirs of Evelyn Sharp
Portrait of Roger Dutilleul, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920. Italian active France. Private collection loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3
Jeanne Hébuterne, 1919, oil on canvas.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loan to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Nowhere in this work is there evidence of the existential calamity of Modigliani’s life.
What there is is a considerable body of work – painted in oil and in watercolour; and sculpted in limestone (and at least one piece in wood).
detail of Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 1919; as below
This is an original, continuously experimented reworking of elements of the traditions which he had absorbed:
the Italian Renaissance and Mannerist traditions, Cycladic and classical Greek art, African ritual art, Manet, Cézanne , Brancusi, the Impressionists and of the burgeoning style of his contemporaries including Cubism.
Some scholars believe that they can trace even the influence of Khmer art in his work.
Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 1919.
Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920, Italian active France. Loaned to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia in 2022/3 by the Museu de Arte Contemporanea da Universitade de Sao Paolo.
At the beginning of January, 1920, Amedeo Modigliani, ill, emaciated and weak, wrote in his sketchbook:
“A new year. Here begins a new life.”
Which the gods granted,
not to his life – they took his life a few days later –
but to his legacy
which is a daring transmission in renewed form of the graphic and sculptural traditions of Amedeo Modigliani’s rich heritage.