Modigliani

A high-speed, high-stakes thriller from Ken Follett, the grand master of international action and suspense. A fabulous "lost masterpiece" becomes the ultimate prize—for an art historian whose ambition consumes everyone around her, an angry young painter with a plan for revenge on the art establishment, and a desperate gallery owner who may have double-crossed his own life away. Behind the elegance and glamour of the art world, anything goes—theft, forgery, betrayal, and maybe even murder. . . .

Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) produced some of the most memorable art of the early twentieth century. Born in Livorno, Italy, and working in Paris from 1906, his career was tragically short but experimentation and innovation were consistent priorities. This ambitious new monograph is the most comprehensive book on the artist published to date, covering all aspects of Modigliani's brief yet seminal career. This book brings together Modigliani's paintings, sculptures and drawings alongside comparable works by his peers, such as Jacob Epstein and Paul Cézanne, as well as Brancusi and early Picasso. It connects Modigliani with contemporary practice in the bohemian quarter of Montparnasse as well as with wider visual culture in early twentieth-century Paris. All works from the exhibition will be stunningly reproduced in full colour, making this publication one of the most comprehensive surveys of Modigliani's work ever published. This book offers an insight into the artist's life and work from different perspectives and is a vital addition to the library of experts and newcomers alike.

“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 . . .

Modigliani is a narrative epic poem based on the life of one of the most interesting and extraordinary artists of the Twentieth century. It is an accessible and clear poetical statement on a man whose art responded to and broke with tradition, helping to shape modern art.

The life of the painter Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) was chaotic and tragically brief. Consisting of a series of vignettes, mostly set in the painter's studio and peopled by his lover Jeanne Hébuterne (who ended her own life the day after Modigliani's death), the prostitutes who were his occasional models and several Bohemian visitors, the novel spans the last months of Modigliani's life, evoking the strange workings of the painter's troubled and often drug-fuelled mind and its expression in his paintings, ultimately succeeding in conveying something of the intense artistic life of Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Excerpt from Modigliani: Man and Myth Modigliani: Man and Myth was written by Jeanne Modigliani. This is a 297 page book, containing 39884 words and 183 pictures. Search Inside is enabled for this title. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In 1916, unable to sell his paintings and unable to work, Modigliani decides to leave Paris. A robbery attempt, aided by his painter/friends Turillo and Soutine fails and he seeks money from Zbo, his agent, who informs him he's about to meet Cheron, an influential art dealer. Modigliani's poet/mistress, Beatrice Hastings, tries to convince him to meet Cheron himself. Frightened of failure, he finally agrees only to discover Zbo has given away his best painting. His meeting with Cheron is a disaster and, in a rage, he slashes his paintings and attempts to destroy all the work in his studio. Beatrice prevents this and forces him to realize the paintings are his life. Left alone with no possibilities for success, Modigliani begins work again on a self portrait.