Amedeo Modigliani: Biography Of This ‘cursed’ Italian Painter
They called him Modì which, in addition to being an abbreviation of his last name, Modigliani, is the French pronunciation for the word maudit, “damned”. And the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani lived quickly, in a hurry, and spent his existence in an absolute waste of alcohol, drugs and love. Usually calm and even shy, when he drank he could be terrible, and his successive partners paid the consequences for his rows. One abandoned him, fed up with his cries; the other she endured stoically and ended up committing suicide after the painter’s death.
If you have been left with your mouth open, it is no wonder. Modigliani is one of the enfants terribles of Parisian bohemia at the beginning of the 20th century, which was not at all lagging behind the other artistic elements of the time. They were all part of the call Paris School, an absolutely heterogeneous “catch-all” in which artists of diverse styles and origins were included. Modigliani was one of them.
Brief biography of Amedeo Modigliani, the “cursed” artist
Amedeo was born in a hot July of 1884 in Livorno, an Italian coastal city, into a more or less wealthy family of Italian Jews. Despite feeling very attached to France, his host country, Modigliani always felt linked to his homeland, his face Italywhich they say he invoked seconds before dying, in the miserable bed of a poor hospital.
Between reality and legend
Many things have been said about Modigliani, and not all of them are true. It is the price to pay to go down in history as one of the bohemian painters of early Paris. Belle Époque. Yes, the legend follows in the footsteps of this man who, despite the fact that he really suffered from excesses with drink and drugs and was always poorer than rats, all those close to him agree in stating that he was generous and that, above all, he loved beauty above all things In particular, the poetry of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), whose Divine Comedy He recited by heart, his special sensitivity subdued by the verses of the immortal Florentine.
The film that was made about him in 2004, titled precisely Modigliani and starring an excellent Andy García, it presents a talkative and joking Amedeo, always ready to give free rein to his “typical” Italian humor. In reality, and according to the testimony left by his close friend André Salmón (1881-1969), the artist was of few words and somewhat shy. Except, of course, when he drank, which he did not rarely do. This love of wine (and, furthermore, cheap wine from the city’s bohemian bars) as well as hashish (the “devil’s merry-go-round,” they called this drug at the time), was going to give Modigliani that “damned” aura. which placed him on the same pedestal as Verlaine and Baudelaire.
The artistic community of Montmartre saw Modigliani as a kind of fallen aristocrat. And, despite his situation, which was almost always very poor, Amedeo always dressed elegantly and maintained a distinguished bearing that made him stand out above all the others.
It’s not that Amedeo’s family was wealthy. Perhaps spurred on by the painter himself, the story began to spread in Paris that the Modigliani were bankers, but nothing could be further from the truth. His father, Flaminio Modigliani, had a modest business in Livorno, which collapsed after the birth of Amedeo, the youngest of four brothers. The father decided to try his luck in mining in Sardinia, while Eugenie, the mother, of French origin, was forced to support the family.
At fourteen years old, the young man Finger (that’s what he was called in the family) began his first artistic studies with Guglielmo Micheli (1866-1926), a painter from Livorno greatly influenced by the aesthetics of the macchiaioli of Florence, so called because they paint with “spots”, unlike the official Academy. However, the period of Amedeo’s greatest youth artistic training was his student years in Florence and Venice. In those years, the artist had already contracted tuberculosis that would last his entire life and lead to his death.
Paris, always Paris
In 1906, Amedeo Modigliani leaves his beloved Italy and travels to Paris. How could he be any other way? The city was the epicenter of art at the time, the place where any aspiring artist aimed his sights. Picasso had settled in 1900 and, when Modigliani made an appearance in the city, the man from Malaga was about to present his revolutionary painting The Young Ladies of Avignonthe work with which the rise of cubism is traditionally related.
But, in addition to Picasso (whom Modigliani did not frequent too much, if we believe the testimony of André Salmon) other artists swarm in the City of Light such as the fauvist André Derain (1880-1954), the Japanese Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968) or Chaïm Soutine (1894-1943), a Jewish painter of Belarusian origin with whom Amedeo forged a friendship in which there was not only time to drink wine and chat, but also to enter the slaughterhouses at night to take away entire pieces of cattle. that were to serve as a model for Soutine’s strange expressionist paintings.
Despite being surrounded by art and artists, Modigliani’s work will take a long time to come. Most of his production will occur practically in the last five years of his life, in which, after finding inspiration and the path, he paints incessantly. These are the years in which he executed the famous portraits of him, with characteristic long necks and tiny, expressionless eyes; More than people, Modigliani’s portraits are masks, beautiful tribal masks that he, by the way, had the opportunity to contemplate in Paris, in the Musée de l’Homme. For Modigliani, as well as for all artists of the early 20th century, primitivism represented the beautiful fascination with lost worlds, a return to pure forms. In short, a true escape from reality.
Also probably to escape from that reality (where there is hardly anything to eat and where the freezing nights of Paris soak into the bones) the inhabitants of the slums of Paris consume enormous quantities of hashish and alcohol. In those years it was easy to get hold of a small box of drugs, and the artists of Montmartre knew where they had to go. Hashish, known as devil’s carouselhad a reputation for “opening doors” and taking consumers on extraordinary journeys, which made them forget hunger and loneliness.
In 1909, Modigliani had settled permanently in Paris and had rented a modest studio in Montparnasse, a neighborhood that had replaced Montmartre as the epicenter of Parisian bohemia. And, despite the artist’s aristocratic elegance permeating the entire room, Modigliani hardly has anything to put in his mouth, and spends his days between wine, drugs and sex. An unbridled lifestyle that will undermine his already delicate health (remember that he has had tuberculosis since adolescence) and that, in the end, will end with his premature death.
There are many women who allow themselves to fall into the arms of the “damned man”: models and prostitutes, but also “good” ladies, like the one who was his first stable partner, the Englishwoman Beatrice Hastings (1879-1943). Beatrice, who hid her real name, Emily Alice Haigh, behind a pseudonym, was a very cultured and refined woman who had grown up in London and South Africa and who had published some books. She maintained close contact with the Parisian intellectual life of the time, and it was through her that she met Amedeo.
Their relationship was stormy, as it could not be otherwise. The Italian had too many fits of anger and Beatrice was not willing to put up with it. So, one day, she left the way she had come. However, Modigliani was not left alone. Devoted to art day and night, his production began to be feverish Nothing was going to stop him now.
Modigliani’s great work and a last love
It seemed that Modigliani had finally found his artistic path. In 1909, coinciding with his move to Montparnasse, he had tried to be a sculptor, inspired by the magnificent African works that he had seen in the Musée de l’Homme. A good proof of this is its Woman’s Head, made in 1911 and showing a stylized and geometric face. Amedeo would continue trying to make his way as a sculptor until 1914, the year in which he stopped the activity, since the dust from the material was very harmful to his diseased lungs and, furthermore, the material was too expensive.
Modigliani would draw inspiration for his paintings from African and Cambodian sculpture, which inevitably refer to idols of primitive cultures. The style of his portraits is extremely characteristic, so much so that it is not necessary to see the signed work to know that it is a Modigliani. The Portrait of Lunia Czechowska (1919), with its very long swan neck, or the Portrait of Beatrice Hastings (1915), whose face is reminiscent of an African mask, are perfect examples of his unmistakable style.
However, Amedeo’s great muse and great love was Jeanne Hébuterne (1898-1920), a young woman from a wealthy Catholic family who studied painting at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. It seems that Amedeo saw her for the first time in her classrooms, but he did not dare to speak to her until much later, when he found her sitting timidly at one of the cafe tables. The Rotonde. There are several versions about how the two young people met and began to become intimate, but the truth is that, shortly after the meeting, Jeanne and Modì were already living together in a modest studio in Montparnasse. Jeanne appears in many of her paintings, with her small, sweet blue eyes and her long reddish hair falling over her shoulders. The romance is stormy, as one might expect, but those close to the couple assure that Modigliani drinks less and that he appears much more serene and happy. Had he finally found the peace and stability he so needed?
In 1920, Modigliani’s tuberculosis worsened, and the artist entered a state of semi-consciousness. A few months earlier, encouraged by the art dealer Léopold Zborowski (who becomes his supporter), Jeanne and Amedeo had traveled to the Côte d’Azur, where the girl had given birth to a daughter. The couple hoped that the mild climate of the Mediterranean would calm the illness of Modì, but nothing could be done now. In January 1920, Amedeo Modigliani died in a Paris hospital, at the age of thirty-five, just when he was beginning to touch fame with the tips of his fingers.
The tragedy did not stop here. One day after the Italian’s death, Jeanne Hébuterne, almost nine months pregnant, committed suicide by jumping from the window of her room.
