Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani: The Long Neck of Modern Art

On 3 December 1917, the only solo exhibition Amedeo Modigliani would ever have opened at the Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris. Police shut it down the same day, offended by the nudes hung in the street-front window; the show was allowed to continue only after the offending canvases came out of the glass. He was thirty-three, tubercular, and trading paintings for restaurant meals. In November 2015, one of those nudes, *Nu couché*, sold at Christie's in New York for $170.4 million.

A Livorno Boy Raised on Lautréamont

He was the child of a collapse. His father, Flaminio, a mining engineer and businessman, was ruined in 1883 when metal prices fell; his mother, Eugénie Garsin, from an intellectual Sephardic Mediterranean family with roots in Talmudic scholarship, opened a school and made it profitable. Family legend traced the Garsins to Spinoza, a claim that could not survive the fact that Spinoza had no children. Eugénie noticed something in her son early. When he was eleven she wrote: "Perhaps an artist?"

Illness arrived at the same age. Pleurisy at eleven, typhoid soon after, tuberculosis at sixteen — the disease that would organise and end his life. He studied with the painter Guglielmo Micheli in Livorno from about 1898 to 1900, enrolled in 1902 at the Free School of Nude Studies at Florence's Accademia di Belle Arti, and moved in 1903 to Venice and the Regia Accademia, where he first tried hashish. His maternal grandfather had pushed him toward difficult books; he read Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Carducci, and the Comte de Lautréamont, memorising *Les Chants de Maldoror*, the text that would later underwrite Parisian Surrealism. From Capri in 1901 he advised a friend to "seek to provoke...these fertile stimuli, because they can push the intelligence to its maximum creative power."

Paris, and the Destruction of the Evidence

He arrived in Paris in 1906 as a well-dressed academician: sketching nudes at the Académie Colarossi, writing home, drinking moderately. Meeting Picasso, he allowed that the man was a genius but found his workmen's clothes inexcusable. Within a year the persona was gone. He abandoned the wardrobe and the good studio and destroyed nearly all his early work — "Childish baubles," he called it, "done when I was a dirty bourgeois."

The dissipation that followed has a second reading. Scholars including his biographer Meryle Secrest have argued that Modigliani cultivated a reputation for alcohol and drugs partly to disguise tuberculosis, the leading cause of death in France by 1900 and grounds for social exile. Critic Peter Schjeldahl put the calculus bluntly: "Drunks were tolerated; carriers of infectious diseases were not." The substances also worked as pain relief.

Stone Before Paint

The dealer Paul Guillaume pushed him toward sculpture and introduced him to Constantin Brâncuși. Between 1909 and 1914 Modigliani carved stylised stone heads, exhibiting them at the 1912 Salon d'Automne alongside the Cubist Section d'Or group. The war ended it: materials vanished and his lungs could not take the dust. In June 2010 one of those limestone *Têtes* became the third most expensive sculpture ever sold.

Painting absorbed what the stone had taught. Early on he followed Toulouse-Lautrec; around 1907 he fell hard for Cézanne. What emerged fit nothing — not Cubism, not Futurism, not Dada, not Surrealism. He took the linear economy of African carving and married it to Renaissance figurative humanism, and produced faces that are masks and necks that are columns. He appreciated Jean Cocteau's advice, "Ne t'attardes pas avec l'avant-garde."

The Nudes

The dealer Léopold Zborowski, befriended in 1916, gave him an apartment, models, materials and fifteen to twenty francs a day. Out of that arrangement came the dozens of nudes painted between 1916 and 1919 that are now his most famous work — commercial commissions, not private confessions. Alongside them ran the portraits of Montparnasse: Chaïm Soutine, with whom he shared quarters at the Cité Falguière around 1916, plus Moïse Kisling, Diego Rivera, Juan Gris, Max Jacob, Jacques Lipchitz, Blaise Cendrars, Picasso and Cocteau. In 1918–19 Zborowski moved him to Nice, where he produced many of the paintings now valued in the tens of millions and sold them for a few francs apiece.

The Women, and the Ending

Anna Akhmatova met him in 1910, when she was twenty-one and he twenty-six; tall, dark-haired, grey-green-eyed, she was his physical ideal, and after a year of studios and intensity she returned to her husband. The English critic Beatrice Hastings stayed nearly two years and sat for *Madame Pompadour*. The painter Nina Hamnett remembered a café in 1914 where the smiling man at the next table introduced himself as "Modigliani, painter and Jew."

In spring 1917 the sculptor Chana Orloff introduced him to Jeanne Hébuterne, a nineteen-year-old art student from a devout Catholic bourgeois family who disowned her for taking up with a man they considered "a debauched derelict." Their daughter Jeanne was born in Nice in 1918. He fathered at least three other children by other women, and was known to be abusive toward his lovers. By 1919 his tuberculosis had turned severe. In January 1920 a neighbour found him delirious, holding Hébuterne; he died on 24 January at the Hôpital de la Charité. The next day, eight months pregnant, she threw herself from a fifth-floor window at her parents' home, killing herself and the child. Her body was not moved to lie beside his until 1930. His stone reads: "Struck down by death at the moment of glory." Hers: "Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice."

Why Amedeo Is Called a Genius

The case for Modigliani is a case about the eye and the hand, not the intellect, and it should be made honestly. He invented no theory, founded no movement, and published no manifesto. What he had was a formal signature so complete that it became a permanent piece of visual vocabulary: the elongated neck, the tipped head, the blank almond eye, the mask-face that reads as a person anyway. He solved a problem the Cubists were also working on — how to make a modern picture out of a human face — and solved it by compression and stylisation rather than fracture, without the theoretical scaffolding his contemporaries needed. Schjeldahl remembered his own "thrilled first exposure, as a teenager, to one of his long-necked women, with their piquantly tipped heads and mask-like faces," which is the effect at work.

The counter-case is real. In the 1920s the art historian André Salmon credited hashish and absinthe with the whole thing, calling Modigliani "a totally pedestrian artist when sober" and claiming that "from the day that he abandoned himself to certain forms of debauchery, an unexpected light came upon him, transforming his art" — a claim that sent a generation of hopefuls into self-destruction chasing the same light. His range is narrow: he painted one face many times. And his style is imitable enough that he became one of the most forged artists in the world, with some scholars estimating that up to 70 per cent of works attributed to him are fakes. That is a mark of desirability and of reproducibility at once.

Legacy

He died destitute and became a legend within a decade — "the epitome of the tragic artist," his posthumous myth nearly rivalling Van Gogh's. The record prices followed: $68.9 million for *La Belle Romaine* in 2010, $170.4 million for *Nu couché* in 2015, $157.2 million in 2018, the highest price in Sotheby's history. Nine novels, a play, a documentary and three feature films have retold the life; his daughter grew up to write *Modigliani: Man and Myth*. Even medicine kept him: pseudo-goitre, the condition that lends a neck that long curve, is also called Modigliani syndrome.