Beatrice Hasting, a British poet with whom he shared his life for two years, saw him as: “A complex character; a pig and a pearl.” When meeting him the first time at La Crèmerie in Paris not knowing who he was, she wasn’t at all impressed: “He looked ugly, ferocious, greedy.” She met him again at La Rotonde coffee bar where she found him: “Shaved and charming. He raised his cap with a pretty gesture, blushed to his eyes.” Cocteau in turn said of him: “He was handsome, 

serious, romantic. He represented perhaps the last period of elegance in Montparnasse.” Indeed, according to Leopold Zborowski his primary art dealer and friend: “When he wasn’t drunk he could be a charming companion, laugh like a child, and be lyrical in translating Dante, making one love and understand him. He was naturally erudite, a good debater on art and philosophy, amiable and courteous. That was his real nature,  nevertheless he was just as often crazily irritable, sensitive, and annoyed for some reason he didn’t know. When he was drunk, he was off his head.”

   Amedeo Modigliani followed a proper academic education until the age of 14. Philosophy was part of his upbringing and at home he was made familiar with the writings of great Italian poets: Dante, Petrarch and Léopardi. He often shared philosophic discussions with his grand-father and read Baudelaire, Nietzsche and Spinoza, learning some passages by heart which he would later crecite in front of his friends, surprising them. Later in Paris, the collection Les Chants de Maldoror by Lautréamont would never leave his pocket. His mother Eugénie, who frequented a French Catholic school, communicated her knowledge of the French language to Amadeo. In the summer

of 1895, he fell ill with severe pleurisy. His mother wrote in her diary: “I haven’t got over the fear this gave me. The character of this child isn’t formed enough for me to have an opinion. We will see later what there is in this chrysalis. May be an artist?”
   Amedeo’s vocation became clearer in the summer of 1898 when he began drawing 
lessons, which were followed by his registration at Guglielmo Micheli’s class, one of the founders of the ‘Macchiaioli’ School in Livorno. The principal theory of the Macchiaioli School was that areas of light and shadow, or ‘macchie’ (patches or spots), were the chief components of a work of art.This movement in Italy corresponds to the French Impressionist Movement. From then on, Amedeo abandoned all academic studies to dedicate himself entirely to painting, “all day and every day with sustained enthusiasm” as reported in Eugenie’s diary. 
   His artistic formation anchored in the Italian spirit of the second half of the 19th century, will always remain a great source of inspiration as well as a dynamic for his personal search. His autonomy in painting  was better expressed in nudes as noticed by one of his former class friends; this is where he indulges his taste for lines. Modigliani also pursued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in 1902 after passing the entrance examination and registered at the Free ‘School of the Nude’ in Venice the following year, painting at least one canvas a week while attending these two art schools. On these studies in Venice he wrote to his friend Oscar Ghilia: “I have received from Venice the most precious teachings of my life: I seem to be leaving Venice uplifted by work.”
  In 1906, enriched, comforted and healed, Modigliani aged 20 reached Paris, ‘the Art Capital’ of the time. After living comfortably for three weeks with the money his mother gave him, he moved to the hilly Montmartre District destined to become a new building plot.  He finally settled in Montparnasse to discover the works of avant-garde artists from all-over Europe, such as Zadkine, Brancusi and Gargallo. During these 14 or so Parisian years, Amedeo went back to his native town Livorno only twice. 

  Modigliani drew inspiration there from Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec whom he admired above all, as well as James Abott Whistler (1834-1903) and his delicate tones, and Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931), the ‘most prominent and fashionable society portraitist’ who was another inspirational painter. His first works upon arriving in the French Capital were also influenced by the illustrator Aubrey Bearsley (1872-1898). 
   Jacques Lipchitz who knew him well wrote after his death: “He worked, it seemed, entirely by instinct, which, however, was extremely fine and sensitive, perhaps owing much to his Italian inheritance and his love of the painting of the early Renaissance masters.” Primitive Art or African masks which were highly fashionable at the time did influence Modigliani but according to Lipchitz, “he could not permit abstraction to interfere with feeling, to get between him and his subjects.” Looking at the expression of his sculptures, realized between 1910 and 1912 we may understand such affirmation. 

  An average of 30 sandstone effigies, hieratic and elongated, mainly feminine, bear an obvious influence from African masks, including Etruscan in his first creations and Gothic in his last. It was Doctor Paul Alexandre, his main buyer, who introduced him to the Romanian Sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957). Brancusi, who refused in 1906 to work with Rodin because ‘nothing grows in the shade of large trees’, instructed and guided Modigliani towards the constructive art of sculpture and direct carving. Dr. Alexandre who was close to Modigliani from 1907 to 1912 said of him: “He trusted any stranger we might introduce him to, and was completely open with no pretenses, inhibitions or reserve. There was something proud in his attitude and he had a good firm handshake. Modigliani was more than an aristocrat, une noblesse excédée, to use an expression of Baudelaire’s which fits him perfectly.”
  Adolphe Basler states in Modigliani, published in 1931 in Paris, that the first sculptures of Elie Nadelman (1882-1946) made Modigliani marvel, and became a stimulant for the practice of this art. “During a number of years, Modigliani only drew, tracing round or soft arabesques, barely enhancing with blue or rosaceous features the elegant outlines of his numerous caryatids which he always promised to execute in stone.” He only held the chisel until the war, but the few sculptures he left behind leave more than a glimpse of his great aspirations. The simplified lines of his drawings are transposed in sculptures: Tête de Cariatide, drawing on paper (1911), is the sketch  of his stone sculpture: Tête, (1911-1012) kept at the Tate Gallery London; an elongated, sober and recollected face is supported by a tubular neck, forming an aesthetic parallel as much as a complementary and contemplative harmony. An exaggeratedly long nose serves as an ornament to the oval face, while the mouth is almost non-existent and the eyes discretely traced. These characteristicss are recurrent in Modigliani’s sculptures and from them transpire the tranquil climate of human representation; no anguish or perturbation from the outside world can penetrate them. They remain timeless. In spite of being a sculptor by vocation, the difficulty of this physical work forced him to abandon it due to the fragility of his lungs already inflicted with  tuberculosis. Direct carving and the dust it emanates damaged his lungs, and his general condition suffered adding to the consequences of his disordered life. These laborious efforts made him resume painting around 1912, after exhibiting in the summer of the same year a set of 8 stone sculptures at the 10th Salon d’Automne in Paris. 
  “Modigliani is a kind of Black Botticelli,” used to say the art critic and dealer Adolph Basler in 1929, while Jacques Emile Blanche saw him as “a direct descendant of the pious Sienese imagers” in 1933. Aware of his end approaching quickly, Amedeo wrote to his friend and patron Doctor Paul Alexandre in May 1913: “Happiness is an angel with a serious face.” In return Paul Alexandre spoke of Modigliani’s art as a re-creation which always stems from a direct view of nature; “There is nothing, or virtually nothing in his work that does not take as its point of departure an intense visual sensation. The resemblance is remarkable and immediate,” adding, “His constant aim was to simplify while grasping the basic essentials. Unlike most contemporary artists, he was interested in the inner being, and his portraits were real characters.” His paintings, drawings and sculptures show a simplification and purification of forms, and as Alexandre states, he reconstructed the lines of a human face in his own way by fitting them into primitive patterns. This quest was part of his enjoyment and personal development. It is mainly in his paintings of portraits and nudes that his true character is revealed: in rendering faces, expressions and the people he met.
  While Brancusi would make money when he could by washing up in restaurants, loading at the docks or forcing himself to polish floors or make beds in hotels, there was no question of that for Modigliani. He had the style and all the tastes which represented one of the paradoxes of his life: loving wealth, luxury, fine clothes, and yet living in poverty, if not misery. In the last years of his life, Modigliani’s health was completely undermined. Fits of coughing kept him from getting rest and he drank more and more. His friend Zborowski sent him some money in winter 1919 for his health; his paintings were beginning to be sold but he died in 1920, praising ‘Cara Italia’ on his way to hospital. Modigliani began to be known internationally in 1922 when Dr. Barnes discovered his work. His paintings increased in value a few years after his death and continue to do so today. 
  The themes of Amedeo Modigliani’s work are focused on personalities and the woman’s body. When ‘Modi’ took up his brushes and started painting again he began a series of great nudes painted from professional models, lying down or sitting in a sober decor. His orange nudes drawn after a moment of reflection impose their glowing sensuality. He realized many portraits as well and in particular of his friends: Pablo Picasso (1915), Paul Guillaume (1916), Max Jacob (1916), Jacques Lipchitz (1917), Leopold Survage (1918), the Doctor Alexandre, and many others. Pure lines stretched oval faces slightly tilted; almond eyes scarcely tinted with blue, grey or green, whose absent pupils are a means to let us penetrate a new mystery of existence or preserve their secret. The accent is then placed on the costume or the hair style, the attitude and what it reflects. Using a regular palette of rusty reds for the background and oranges for the skin, Modigliani uses solid brush strokes where his deep browns contrast with blue-grey or pale blues, and his black is often paired with lighter tones such as yellow or the recurrent grey. The necks of his models are lengthened, as if aspiring to some height, their pose often languished, graceful, attentive, with a hint of romanticism and a definite elegance, just as his friends have described him. His male portraits are sometimes effeminate: Portrait de Monsieur Baranowski (1918). 
His style reached a stylistic simplification towards 1918 when  the curves of the body were softly rendered. His drawings are thoughtful but quick, with a constant absence of shading and the 
imposition of white. Curved lines are always dominant and the eyes are empty  but the attitude is expressed with an extraordinary economy giving a poignant result. The use of space lets the white of the paper breathe, while  the pencil travels  in convolution as lightly as a bird. 
In a word, harmoniously.
   Amedeo chose a certain type of life; often disordered, scatty and sometimes destructive but was in no way ready to change it. When his friends made comments trying to encourage him to alter it he became as angry as ever. He once said to his friend Lipchitz that he desired “a short but intense life” (‘une vie brève mais intense’). Despite having long sold his drawings or paintings for 10 francs or exchanged them for a meal or a service, as his friend Paul Guillaume would say: “His haughty aristocratic soul will long float among us in the shimmer of his beautiful versicolour rags.”

 

 

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