Amedeo Modigliani

(By Rita Kirkman)

I frequently revisit artists who never fail to touch my heart with their unique talent for the creation of timeless beauty and their representations of the worlds in which they lived. Amedeo Modigliani was born in Italy in 1884 to a French mother and a Jewish-Italian father. From the outset, he was plagued by chronic bad health which he endured for the rest of his short life. At age 7 he suffered from typhoid fever, and thereafter tuberculosis. He was very close to his mother. When he was 11, she noted in her diary:

“The child’s character is still so unformed that I cannot say what I think of it. He behaves like a spoiled child, but he does not lack intelligence. We shall have to wait and see what is inside this chrysalis. Perhaps an artist?”

She supported, encouraged and enrolled him with the best painting master in Italy, Guglielmo Micheli. He was infatuated with life-drawing nudes. He was also strongly attracted to the radical philosophies of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Carducci and their ilk.

Modigliani relocated to Paris in 1906, aged 22. He threw himself into the era of ‘isms,’ Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism and Futurism. He interacted with the avant-garde of talented artists of numerous nationalities, who chose to live there during a time of glorious creativity, experimentation and innovation.

He embraced the seedier side of life by engaging in use of drugs, alcohol (especially absinthe), hashish, and casual sex. Drugs and alcohol were palliatives, to ease his physical pain, and to maintain a façade of vitality, allowing him to create his art. He masked his suffering because he thrived on camaraderie and could not abide the idea of being isolated as an invalid.

Some art historians suggest that Modi would have achieved even greater artistic heights had he not been destroyed by his self-indulgences. I would take issue with that, as it ignores his lifetime of painful illnesses.

Modigliani worked at a furious pace, developing a style so unique that it could not be categorised with the works of others. His work was informed by the linear form of African sculpture and the humanism of the figurative Renaissance painters. He was unclassifiable. He created neither to shock nor outrage but to say “This is what I see.”

He had several meaningful relationships during his short life but his last one with Jeanne Hébuterne was the most serious. She was an accomplished artist in her own right and 14 years his junior. Her parents greatly disapproved of their liaison but she was his great love and muse. They lived together and had a daughter (Jeanne). Modi continued to be prolific despite rapidly deteriorating health. He only exhibited once (the showing was temporarily closed by police on obscenity grounds) and gave many works away, often in exchange for meals in restaurants.

In early 1920, his doctor found him delirious and clutching Jeanne. A few days later, 24 January, he died of tubercular meningitis, aged 35, and destitute. Jeanne was 21 and 8 months pregnant with their second child. The artistic communities of Montmartre and Montparnasse organised a colossal funeral for him. Jeanne, who was inconsolable, threw herself out of a fifth storey window on 26 January, killing herself and the unborn child. It took a decade for her embittered family to consent to relocate her body to rest beside Modigliani. His epitaph reads “Struck down by death at the moment of glory.” Hers: “Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice.”

(12 July 1884 to 24 January 1920)

[P.S. Apparently, Johnny Depp has directed a film called “Modi: 3 Days on the Wings of Madness” (2024). It purports to cover 72 vexatious hours of his life, a chaotic series of events through the streets and bars of war torn Paris in 1916. One feels somewhat trepidatious about it: we’ll see.]

“significant forms…have imaginative value and are at the same time representations of real things.” [Joseph Pijoan, History of Art, (1933), writing with reference to a work by Modigliani.]

“He was essentially a traditionalist who happened to have caught fire from the excitement of a contemporary idiom.” – James Thrall Soby.