Amedeo Modigliani Italian, 1884-1920

Amedeo Modigliani was an Italian artist known for his unique elongated style of portraiture. Characterized by lengthened limbs, almond eyes, and swooping noses, the lasting influence of sculpture—particularly African masks—was prominent in the renderings of his subjects, including his wife the painter Jeanne Hébuterne. “What I am searching for is neither the real nor the unreal, but the subconscious, the mystery of what is instinctive in the human race,” he once said. Born on July 12, 1884 in Livorno, Italy, Modigliani began to paint as a teenager and enrolled in the Reale Istituto di Belle Arti in Venice in 1903. Upon his move to Paris in 1906,he studied at the Académie Colarossi, finding inspiration in the works of Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The young artist’s friendship with Constantin Brancusi sparked his interest in sculpture, informing his artistic tendencies toward curvilinear rhythms and protracted vertical forms. After 1915, Modigliani devoted himself exclusively to painting, emerging as one of the School of Paris’s les maudits—the cursed—along with Chaïm Soutine, Suzanne Valadon, and her son Maurice Utrillo—so named because of their impoverished, bohemian lifestyle. Modigliani’s prodigious talent was cut short when he died at the age of 35 on January 24, 1920 in Paris, France due to complications from tubercular meningitis aggravated by alcoholism. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others.