Which Contemporary Art Movement Was Amedeo Modigliani Particularly Interested in
Life and Work
1884 Amedeo Clemente Modigliani is born on July 12, the quaternary and youngest kid of Flaminio and Eugenia Modigliani, in Livorno (Leghorn). Tuscany. The family belongs to the more than secularised Jewish bourgeoisie and at the fourth dimension of Modigliani'southward birth is in a precarious fiscal situation. Considering of an economic crisis in Italy, the family business goes bankrupt and in club to contribute to the family income Modigliani's mother begins to give private lessons and to take on translations. Modigliani grows upwards in an environment interested in literature and philosophy.1898 Modigliani contracts typhoid fever and his destiny as an artist is revealed to him in a legendary delirious dream. Later on his recovery he leaves school and takes lessons from the painter Guglielmo Micheli at the Art University in Livorno. His blood brother Emanuele, who later becomes a famous representative of the Italian Socialist Party, is sent to prison for 6 months considering of his political activities.
1900 Modigliani contracts tuberculosis and spends the wintertime of 1900/01 in Naples, on Capri and in Rome. Amidst his few remaining, written documents are the five letters that he wrote during this period of recuperation and study to his friend, the artist Oscar Ghiglia.
1902 On May 7 Modigliani enrols in the Scuola libera di Nudo (Free Schoolhouse for Nude Studies) in Florence and takes instruction with Giovanni Fattori. He visits Florence's museums and churches and studies the fine art of the Renaissance.
1903 Modigliani follows his friend Oscar Ghiglia to Venice, where he remains until moving to Paris. On March xix he enrols in the Institute di Belle Arti di Venezia and its life-drawing classes. In Venice'due south museums and churches he occupies himself intensely with the fine art of the sometime masters. At the Biennial in 1903 and 1905 he sees the works of the French Impressionists, sculptures by Rodin and paintings belonging to the genre of Symbolism. In Venice Modigliani becomes acquainted with the "joys of hashish" and is said to have taken part in seances. He befriends artists such as Ortiz de Zarate and Ardengo Soffici and volition encounter them again in Paris. Very few works exist from this menstruum of Modigliani'south studies in Italy.
1906 At the beginning of the twelvemonth Modigliani goes to Paris. He moves into a simple studio on Montmartre and takes life-drawing classes at the Academie Colarossi. He makes the acquaintance of Maurice Utrillo, with whom he will remain friends throughout his life. In the autumn he meets the German painter Ludwig Meidner, who describes him equally the "last, true bohemian".
1907 The painter Henri Doucet takes Modigliani forth to the house on the Rue de Delta, which the young doctor Paul Alexandre and his brother have established to back up immature artists. Alexandre becomes Modigliani's first patron. He buys paintings and drawings from him and gets him commissions for portraits. Modigliani is probably represented with a few works in the fall Salon. He visits the Cezanne retrospective and is deeply impressed. His paintings are strongly oriented towards Symbolist models as well as the painting of Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch.
1908 Modigliani exhibits six paintings in the Salon des Independants, including The Jewess . Despite his poor health, he participates in the sensual, prodigal life of the artists on Montmartre. He moves house several times.
Fruitful Ideas
Peradventure information technology is the proper name. Amedeo Modigliani - it sounds like an elegiac melody, like a well-chosen name for a tragic, poetic figure in a novel, and perhaps it also has something to exercise with the fact that Modigliani, who has always fired the imagination, was not a figure who chosen forth factual and sober clarification. And this sensual-sounding name is not even a pseudonym. Amedeo Modigliani is the name of the artist who was born on July 12, 1884, in Livorno (Leghorn), Italia, into a conservative Jewish family. His portraits and nudes were to become some of the most popular pictures of the twentieth century. No other painter of modernistic times has been every bit heavily encumbered with equally many legends, myths and cliches equally Amedeo Modigliani. Novels and a play accept been written about him, his Maverick lifestyle has been excessively idealised in films, and art criticism is too full of glorifying anecdotes. In contrast to all of this is the very modest number of authenticated documents near Modigliani's life, so that it actually is not like shooting fish in a barrel to recognise the true Modigliani nether all of these fiction-like features. Entwined with the name of Modigliani are all style of ideas about the Bohemian life in Paris, the fateful poverty of the artist and his g passions. Modigliani is the prototype of the creative person who executes his work in the draughty studios of Montmartre and Montparnasse, intoxicated by alcohol, hashish, beloved and poetry; who, around the time of World War I, lives in the artistic eye of Paris and at the aforementioned fourth dimension stands isolated on the fringes of the belle epoque; who, in the capital metropolis of the European avant-garde, surrounded past Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Georges Braque (1882-1963), Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), never seems to waver in pursuing his own path; who experiences little or no success and is so poor that he can but only pay his bills in the legendary bars at the junction of the Montparnasse and Raspail boulevards with quickly sketched portraits of the customers; who dies - at the young historic period of 35 - of tuberculosis, penniless and emaciated at the end of a life which has been entirely devoted to fine art. To heighten the tragedy of his life fifty-fifty more, on the day subsequently his death, his meaning young fiancee, Jeannne Hebuterne, jumps from her parents' fifth-floor flat, leaving behind their modest girl equally an orphan.
The few biographical details that did exist were well-suited to embellishment, thereby becoming an artist's biography par excellence. The creation of the Modigliani legend began immediately later on his early on death in 1920. The chief perpetrators in this were those who had known him the best, the friends and colleagues in Paris, who frequently wrote of their impressions of this proud, stubborn Italian. Although contacts with his family in Livorno during his years in Paris from 1906 to 1920 were rather lapse, they would likewise play a non insubstantial role in the posthumous creation of the Modigliani myth. To brainstorm with, in that location was Amedeo'southward mother, Eugenia Modigliani, a French lady who must accept been remarkably emancipated for her age.
She came from the upper-class Jewish Garsin family in Marseilles and believed that she was descended from the famous philosopher, Spinoza. When Eugenia married Flaminio Modigliani, the son of one of her begetter'due south Italian business organisation partners, in 1872 and moved to Livorno, she had entered a family whose best times were simply over. In the eye of the 1880s, when Amedeo, their fourth and youngest child, was born, an economical slump in Italy caused the family business in wood and coal to get broke. Eugenia contributed to the family unit income with translations of D'Annunzio's verse, book reviews published nether a pseudonym and individual lessons. Her open heed and intellectual interests undoubtedly opened the world of literature and art to Modigliani at an early age. In her diaries, his mother recounts how Modigliani's interests were fired and writes of the support that she gave him. Extracts from the diaries were published after Modigliani's death. It all began with a bad case of pleurisy, which confined the 11-year-old Dedo - as he was affectionately known past his family - to bed for many weeks. "I have even so not recovered from the terrible fear that it gave me", Eugenia records, and in her concern for her youngest kid, she adds: "The child's grapheme is still so unformed that I cannot say what I think of information technology. He behaves like a spoiled brat, merely he does not lack intelligence. Nosotros volition accept to wait and see what is hidden in this doll. Perchance an artist?"
He did indeed get an artist merely, as family unit lore had information technology, a second decisive factor was needed in order for this to happen. One time again it was illness that served as a goad for Modigliani'due south career. When he was 14 he caught typhoid fever - at the time still a fatal disease - and, according to his mother, in his delirium her son revealed his ardent desire to become an creative person. He had fantasies of the masterpieces in Italia's museums and churches and when, every bit if by a phenomenon, he regained his health he was permitted to leave school and enrol at the art academy in Livorno. Ane may doubt the veracity of Modigliani'due south mother's recollections, as the artist's daughter, Jeanne Modigliani, does in her biography Modigliani: Man and Myth; yet, this story fulfils an important function. Mapped out in Modigliani'south childhood were all of the tragic highs and lows that would determine his later life. It was only by condign an creative person that he was able to recover and it was this which allowed his family to legitimise his unconventional life. The pain and hallucinations of disease ironically helped the young Modigliani recognise his goal in life, and assistance usa to understand his later life. The "spoiled brat" becomes a dandy and "the last existent Maverick". The small, sickly boy in Livorno becomes the great, suffering artist in Paris, the painter who spares neither his strength nor his health in the creation of his piece of work.
When Modigliani began his art studies at the age of xiv, he was the youngest in his course. The small academy in Livorno was headed by Guglielmo Micheli (1886-1926), a student of Giovanni Fattori (1825-1908), the well-nigh famous representative of the group of Italian Impressionists known every bit the Macchiaioli. Like the French painters they modelled themselves on - Claude Monet (1840-1926), Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) and Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) - the Macchiaioli too sought to bring scenes from nature to canvas in small blobs of colour (It. macchia: spot, stain).
In addition to the training he received in Guglielmo Micheli's form, Modigliani also attended a life-drawing class in Gino Romiti'due south studio in Livorno. In July 1900 Modigliani celebrated his sixteenth birthday. One time again, nonetheless, he fell seriously sick. To help bring about a more than speedy recovery, he spent the winter of 1900/01 in Italy'south warmer s - Naples, Capri and Rome - accompanied by his female parent. "... I am now rich in fruitful ideas and I must produce my work", were the dramatic words of the immature fine art student to Oscar Ghiglia, his friend from the art academy in Livorno, to whom he wrote a number of letters during this period of convalescence and written report. Modigliani's enthusiasm for Rome was boundless: "... As I speak to you, Rome is non outside just within me, like a terrible precious stone set upon its seven hills as upon seven imperious ideas. Rome is the orchestration which girds me, the circumscribed arena in which I isolate myself and concentrate my thoughts. Her feverish sweetness, her tragic countryside, her own beauty and harmony, all these are mine, for my thought and my work".
In the jump of 1901, Modigliani followed Ghiglia - nine years his senior - to Florence where, after one time again spending the winter in Rome, he enrolled at the Scuola libera di Nudo (Free Schoolhouse for Nude Studies). In 1903 he went with Ghiglia to Venice, where he as well took life-cartoon classes. He was quickly at home in Venice'south earth of cafes and artists. At the time, he was a young man with "... a graceful countenance and gracious features. Neither tall nor brusque, he was slim and dressed with simple elegance"; this is how the painter Ardengo Soffici (1879-1964) remembers him from his visit to Venice in 1903. He establish Modigliani to exist a knowledgeable guide to the city. Soffici was impressed by Modigliani's "passionate interest in the painting techniques of the Sienese Trecento painters, and peculiarly in the Venetian, Carpaccio, whom he seemed to love the most at the time".
Modigliani appears to accept spent the time before he moved to Paris more in the intensive written report of Italian art history than in any further grooming as an creative person. Nevertheless, his studies in Italy, the visits to original paintings and sculptures and thus the appreciation of an art historical tradition, the discovery of "forms full of beauty and harmony", equally he put it in his letter from Rome, were some of the about of import foundations for the after development of Modigliani's art. If Modigliani took in more than he produced during the time he was in Venice, his friend Oscar Ghiglia, with whom he shared a studio for a time, was all the more industrious. In 1903 Ghiglia succeeded in showing a painting - a rather traditional portrait of a adult female - at the Venice Biennial. At this exhibition, contemporary painting was chiefly represented by the now universally respected French Impressionists. Every bit far equally sculpture was concerned, great homage was paid to the genius of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). In that location were, however, as well many works which can be
described as Symbolist, many dream-like pictures with surreal scenarios; these must have had a strong impression on Modigliani, who loved the poems of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Unlike Impressionism, which had originated solely in France, at the end of the nineteenth century Symbolism was a pan-European motility, encompassing literature every bit well as the fine arts. The Symbolists shared a common goal, namely to create pictures that were contrary to visible reality. Through the irrational contents of their pictures, they wished to testify that another, hidden reality could at least be conceived. The end of the nineteenth century saw Sigmund Freud in Vienna researching the effects of hallucinogenic drugs and hypnosis and preparing his seminal work on the interpretation of dreams. At the same fourth dimension, artists such every bit the Belgian Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) and James Ensor (1860-1949), the French Odilon Redon (1840-1916) and Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863-1944) and the Austrian Alfred Kubin (1877-1959) were attempting to develop pictorial symbols for spiritual and mystic contents, for psychological moods and for suggestive apparitions in dreams.
At that place are also few surviving paintings from Modigliani's student years to allow one to ascertain a directly influence of Symbolist painting. Afterwards, even so, during the outset years in Paris, a few paintings adopted the motifs of fin de siecle painting. These include the half-figure Sorrowful Nude of 1908. If one compares Modigliani's gaunt, female figure to the figures of the Belgian Art Nouveau painter, George Minne (1886-1941), or with Edvard Munch's lithograph Madonna, the similarity in the perception of the body becomes all too evident. In the motif of the head bent back and the rima oris slightly opened as if in pain, suffering and ecstasy, sensuality and hurting are rendered as being close to each other. These figures present themselves to us removed from reality. They are locked in silence and introspection. All expression of the individual person is completely subconscious behind a mask-like countenance.
 Pablo Picasso Woman in a Chemise 1905 |
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The eyes - "mirrors of the soul" - play an unusually important role in the piece of work of the Symbolist painters. Whether closed as in slumber, open or blind, they are always a visionary organ, i which tin be directed both outwards and inwards. This is significant for Modigliani's afterwards development as a painter, insofar as the eyes of his sitters also take on the visionary role they had already played for the Symbolists. Moreover, the silent introversion and the depersonalised visage, in which all subjectivity has been relinquished for an expression beyond all individualism, characterise Modigliani'south later portraits and document his lasting intellectual connectedness to Symbolist painting.
The Venice Biennial of 1903 certainly offered art which was new and heady, but did not brandish the latest trends. Afterwards spending ii years in Venice, Modigliani took the merely step possible for a young, aggressive artist of this fourth dimension: he went to Paris.
Paris in 1906: French republic's upper-case letter had 2.73 meg inhabitants, and 978 kilometres of streets; the boulevards designed past Haussmann were the pride of the Parisians. 9,622 arc lamps and nearly one-half a million electric light bulbs illuminated the "city of lights", whose keepsake had become the Eiffel Tower congenital for the World Exposition in 1889. "In the richness and diversity of its art treasures, Paris stands alone" was how an encyclopedia of 1906 put it. Under the entry "fortification" it reads: "While Paris in 1840 was an open up urban center, it is now the earth'due south largest war machine fortification".
Modigliani arrived in Paris eight years before the outbreak of Earth Warl. These years were amongst the most eventful in the history of European art. It was during these years that the seeds were sown of farther developments in the twentieth century - a process that was violently interrupted by the showtime international catastrophe of the twentieth century. In the Paris of 1906, however, at that place were no signs of an approaching war for an Italian artist looking to the future. Other things - which, at the time, could not be read about in an encyclopedia - were of far greater importance to him. He would have been interested in the fact that Paris was the unqualified capital of European avant-garde painting; that many progressive art dealers in the urban center were on the lookout for young talent; that only in the preceding year a violently colourful and wild style of painting had conquered the Salon d'Automne. This was a style linked to the unknown names of Henri Matisse, Andre Derain (1880-1954) and Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958), upon whom the critics had bestowed the sarcastic proper noun "Les Fauves" ("wild beasts"). Modigliani would also take been interested in the fact that the art scene was all the same centred around Montmartre - indeed, that it had actually just been renewed and rejuvenated by figures such equally Picasso, Juan Gris (1887— 1927) and other residents of the legendary Bateau Lavoir - and that this expanse nonetheless had the reputation for adept times in the cafes, theatres and dance halls which had been immortalized by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901). Paris in 1906: the starting time of the second stage of the modernistic movement. With the death of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) on October 22, 1906, the concluding - after Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) - of the iii Post-Impressionist "founding fathers of the modern move" had died. In the same year, the French state bought Edouard Manet's (1832-1883) Dejeuner sur I'herbe, a work that had been considered outrageously modern in 1863. Its delineation of a naked woman at a picnic in the forest with properly dressed gentlemen had acquired an enormous scandal in the French art world.
 Pablo Picasso Woman's Head 1901 | |
Being the skillful, bourgeois male child that he was, Modigliani offset stayed in a comfortable hotel on the right bank of the Seine upon his arrival in Paris. Shortly, however, he moved upward to Montmartre where, co-ordinate to the art critic Adolphe Basler, his quick wit and good looks "chop-chop made him popular". One of Modigliani'due south showtime friendships in Paris was formed with the High german creative person Ludwig Meidner (1844-1966), who had come to Paris for one year to study at the Academie Julian. Meidner subsequently recalled Modigliani's early days in Paris and, like Basler, he emphasised the impression that Modigliani made on those around him. "In the first decade of our century, one still had a taste for the Bohemian life that had developed in the nineteenth century; in Paris - on Montmartre and Montparnasse - the last representatives of this world were the sophisticated and spoiled sons of the one-time bourgeoisie. Our Modigliani - or 'Modi' as he was called - was a feature and, at the same time, highly talented representative of Bohemian Montmartre; he was probably even its last truthful Bohemian." Meidner also records, even so, that he was impressed past the open-mindedness, esprit and commitment shown by Modi (whose nickname was undoubtedly an illusion to the peintre maudit, or "accursed painter"). And here, too, the Italian origins play an important role. "Never before had I heard a painter speak of dazzler with such fire. He showed me photographs of works by early Florentine masters whose names I did not yet know."
In 1907, Modigliani probably participated in the Salon d'Automne (Fall Salon) in the Grand Palais. Founded a few years before, it was reserved for the avant-garde. This exhibition forum, where no jury presided, was all the same dominated by the Fauvists, whose expressive application of color represented a further step towards the autonomy of the pictorial plane and away from the illusionistic reproduction of objects. Van Gogh had already shown that pure, unmixed colours could serve to express moods. Gauguin, whose contribution to the evolution of the modernistic movement lay in his radical concentration on the pictorial surface, had said: "Before one even knows what the picture represents, one is immediately seized by the magical chords of its colours". Even more than radical was Matisse's observation made a brusque time afterwards: "Seek the strongest colour effect possible - the content is of no importance".
Modigliani's tentative searching in the midst of the different avant-garde movements is apparent in his portrait The Jewess . The statuesque, astringent-looking figure betrays the influence of the linear mode of Toulouse-Lautrec. There are as well echoes of the emaciated figures of Picasso's Bluish Period. Despite the loose brushwork, The Jewess is an extremely measured painting whose main aim lies not in achieving an autonomy in the employ of colours and planes, but rather in carrying a mood. Scepticism, restraint and the sitter's challenging gaze all demonstrate the painter's involvement in the psychology of his discipline. There are, however, also parts of this motion-picture show which are strongly defined by the purely painterly handling of the surface, such equally the field of color in the lower correct-hand corner to which no concrete object can be assigned. Modigliani must accept taken notice of Maurice Denis' (1870-1943) classic definition, namely that "a picture, before being a boxing charger, a nude woman or a story, is substantially a flat surface covered with colours bundled in a sure pattern".
 Studi for The Jewess 1908 |  The Jewess 1908 |
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Portrait of Maude Abrantes
1907
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Female person Nude with Hat
1908
Seated Nude
1908
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