Modigliani The Sculptor

Amadeo Modigliani displays the dialogue that the young Italian artist maintained with antic and extra-Western sculptures from 1910 to 1914. It specifically highlights studies of heads and caryatides, and Modigliani's patient analysis work, such as modulating facial features. Health and financial conditions forced Modigliani to renounce sculpture in 1914. The second part features portraits of Modigliani's friends, also actors of the Parisian avant-garde from Picasso's circle, such as the writer Max Jacob, the merchant Paul Guillaume, Moise Kisling, Viking Eggeling, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens and Leopold Survage. Beyond friendship, these portraits reveal artistic exchanges, where painters and sculptors became Modigliani's models. In his last years, Modigliani perfected his portrait's style, which made him successful: the frame widens, his palette lightens under the influence of Cézanne. In 1918, he met Dutilleul, who purchased around thirty of his paintings and numerous drawings between 1918 and 1946 and posed as his model in 1919. Contents: Introduction; 4 essays: Modigliani and the art of distant countries; Artists' portraits; Roger Dutilleul and Modigliani; Modigliani and art market. Androgyny in Modigliani's art; Modigliani's library; Modigliani at Nice; Illustrated chronology; Modigliani's models' biographies. SELLING POINTS: * This richly illustrated book explores Amadeo Modigliani's work as sculptor and avant-garde portraitist as much as his brief and productive career through Roger Dutilleul collection. The book considers the singular relationship between this passionate amateur, who became one of the most important collectors of Modigliani's work, and the artist whom he met in 1918, less than two years before his premature death

Amedeo Modigliani stands as one of Italy's best-known painters and sculptors of the 20th century, posthumously renowned for his characteristic style and eccentric personality. Writing in the 1950s, Modigliani's daughter Jeanne was only a baby when her father died. Nevertheless, her interest in her father's short life resulted in this biography - the fruits of Jeanne's researches and conversations with those who remembered him are now considered valuable by art historians. We learn of the artist's early years in Italy, his journeys and work in France, his romances and excesses, and the challenges he faced selling his works. Though he had friends to lend him money when times were hard, Modigliani constantly grappled with poverty and illness. The final years of Modigliani's life saw his greatest yet most tragic romance, to the young art student Jeanne Hébuterne. A gifted painter in her own right, Jeanne fell in love with Modigliani and doted on him as his health faltered. When Modigliani expired from tuberculosis, Jeanne was inconsolable, and committed suicide two days later. It was not until the year 2000 that her artworks were showcased alongside her husband's, with the permission of her heirs. This biography includes more than 130 examples of the letters and artworks of Modigliani that the reader may appreciate and observe how his unique art progressed with the years.

An illuminating study of Amedeo Modigliani's early drawings and how they reflect the artist's conception of identity One of the great artists of the 20th century, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is celebrated for revolutionizing modern portraiture, particularly in his later paintings and sculpture. Modigliani Unmasked examines the artist's rarely seen early works on paper, offering revelatory insights into his artistic sensibilities and concerns as he developed his signature style of graceful, elongated figures. An Italian Sephardic Jew working in turn-of-the-century Paris, Modigliani embraced his status as an outsider, and his early drawings show a marked awareness of the role of ethnicity and race within society. Placing these drawings within the context of the artist's larger oeuvre, Mason Klein reveals how Modigliani's preoccupation with identity spurred the artist to reconceive the modern portrait, arguing that Modigliani ultimately came to think of identity as beyond national or cultural boundaries. Lavishly illustrated with the artist's paintings and over one hundred drawings collected by Dr. Paul Alexandre, Modigliani's close friend and first patron, this book provides an engaging and long overdue analysis of Modigliani's early body of work on paper.

“People like us . . . have different rights, different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” —Modigliani Amedeo (“Beloved of God”) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In Modigliani’s time, his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the new approaches of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. Jean Cocteau called Modigliani “our aristocrat” and said, “There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful. Alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.” In this major new biography, Meryle Secrest, one of our most admired biographers—whose work has been called “enthralling” (The Wall Street Journal); “rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written” (The New York Review of Books) —now gives us a fully realized portrait of one of the twentieth century’s master painters and sculptors: his upbringing, a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished but genteel Italian family; his going to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks (“How beautiful he was, my god how beautiful,” said one of his models) . . . his training as an artist . . .and his influences, including the Italian Renaissance, particularly the art of Botticelli; Nietzsche’s theories of the artist as Übermensch, divinely endowed, divinely inspired; the monochromatic backgrounds of Van Gogh and Cézanne; the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified, masklike triangular faces, elongated silhouettes, puckered lips, low foreheads, and heads on exaggeratedly long necks. We see the ways in which Modigliani’s long-kept-secret illness from tuberculosis (it almost killed him as a young man) affected his work and his attitude toward life ; how consumption caused him to embrace fatalism and idealism, creativity and death; and how he used alcohol and opium with laudanum as an antispasmodic to hide the symptoms of the disease and how, because of it, he came to be seen as a dissolute alcoholic. And throughout, we see the Paris that Modigliani lived in, a city in dynamic flux where art was still a noble cause; how Modigliani became part of a life in the streets and a world of art and artists then in a transforming revolution; Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, et al.—and others more radical—Matisse, Derain, etc., all living within blocks of one another. Secrest’s book, written with unprecedented access to letters, diaries, and photographs never before seen, is an extraordinary revelation of a life lived in art . . . Here is Modigliani, the man and the artist, seemingly shy, delicate, a man on a desperate mission, masquerading as an alcoholic, cheating death again and again, and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however much time remained . . .