The Italian Amedeo Modigliani moved to Montmartre as a young man, where thanks to his accent-free French he quickly connected with artistic circles. He was poor, uncompromising, and hard drinking—but he was admired above all for his precise brushstroke.
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was born on July 12, 1884, to Flaminio Modigliani and Eugenia Garsin, Sephardi Jews, in Livorno. He was their fourth child. Sickly at an early age, hypersensitive, and highly educated, as an artist Modigliani believed that he was not bound to middle-class morals; he lived exclusively for his art. Only five foot three, he had a small physique, but he was exceptionally handsome, and with his exquisite, aristocratic manner he had a strong appeal with women. These included the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, the South African feminist Beatrice Hastings, the Franco-Canadian Simone Thirioux, and the Parisian Jeanne Hébuterne.Struck by the works by Toulouse-Lautrec, he moved to Paris in 1906. The Fauvists and Paul Cézanne are celebrating the primacy of pure color; Cubism is just about to be invented. Modigliani considers it to be the wrong track and frivolous; he does not want to dissolve form but preserve it. Consequently, he later refused to sign the Futurist Manifesto.Amedeo Modigliani died of tuberculosis on January 24, 1920, at just thirty-five. The following morning, Jeanne Hébuterne, the artist's companion, went to the hospital to pay her final farewells. She then returned to her parents' apartment, where that night she jumped from the sixth-floor window and met her death. She was pregnant with their second child. A legend is born, and along with it a myth.
After his arrival in Paris, above all, however, in 1908, Modigliani regularly attended art schools, such as the Colarossi and Ranson academies in Montmartre, to practice nude drawing. He had often enough copied the Old Masters in Italy, where he had attended the art academies in Florence and later in Venice. In the art schools Modigliani frequented the models changed their pose after about fifteen minutes. This is probably where he produced Standing Female Nude, which was put to paper with a quick, firm, and masterful stroke. The drawing is extremely precise and succinct. The elegant line celebrates the female body without a trace of vulgarity.
As an old man, the painter and author Maurice de Vlaminck recalled how "these intelligent hands sketched a drawing with a single line, without hesitation." Somewhat later, the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti would describe the Italian as a consummate draftsman and as one of the greatest portraitists of all time. The human being is the primary theme in Modigliani's oeuvre.
Modigliani was the most well read of any of the Montmartre artists. He could recite Dante, Petrarca, Ariost, and Leopardi from memory, yet he was also well acquainted with contemporary lyricists. Besides Spinoza, he perhaps read too much Nietzsche and Gabriele D'Annunzio, and Lautréamont certainly too intimately. He calls himself "Modi," which sounds like maudit, the damned, the accursed. He occasionally flew into terrible rages, which were attributed to alcohol and drugs, but possibly had something to do with the lack of understanding his contemporaries had for his work. Unlike Picasso, who could not utter a correct sentence when he came to Paris, Modi spoke accent-free French and made numerous friends, including Max Jacob and Maurice Utrillo, with whom he drank himself into oblivion on absinthe in order to forget his hunger; Chaim Soutine and Constantin Brancusi, with whom he stole curbstones in order to create sculptures out of them; and Diego Rivera, Jean Cocteau, and Guillaume Apollinaire.
Modigliani was a genuine bohemian and lived outside of his time, without electric light and without a typewriter. He was so poor that he occasionally had to move out in the dead of night because he was yet again unable to pay his rent. He went hungry and he froze. Even when he was destitute, he lived a life of boundless elitism and categorically refused to live from anything else other than his art. Modi even rejected an offer from the illustrated anarchist magazine L'Assiette au beurre, which was published between 1901 and 1912, to work for them as a draftsman for a reasonable salary.
In July 1909, the money that his aunt Laura gave him allowed him to travel to Italy. He wants to apply himself to sculpture and works in the stone quarries of Carrara. However, the artist, who suffered from tuberculosis, could not withstand the strain for very long. He returns to Paris in September with The Peasant from Livorno in his suitcase, which he sells to the physician Paul Alexandre, and The Beggar Woman, which he gives to Jean Alexandre, presumably in return for dental treatment.
In her poverty, The Beggar Woman is reminiscent of Cranach and Botticelli. Line and color palette still adhere to Cézanne, her blind eyes make reference to African masks. Modigliani, who now lives in Montparnasse, will develop a very individual style without it being attributable to a particular school. Due to his frail state of health, he is mustered out of military service, and during World War I he is one of the few men of his age in Paris. The war is not reflected in his oeuvre, which is entirely dedicated to beauty. In 1917 Modigliani meets the nineteen-year-old art student Jeanne Hébuterne, who moves in with him against her parents' will. That same year, a solo exhibition of Modigliani's work takes place in the gallery run by Berthe Weill that ends in a scandal. The custodians of the law consider his nude paintings to be a provocation, an attack on common decency, and close the exhibition. Not a single painting would be sold.
During his short, eventful life, Modigliani fails to achieve success both on the art market as well as with the critics. He dies in 1920, and Jeanne Hébuterne on his heels. Modigliani's sister Margherita adopts their daughter. In 1930, with the permission of the Hébuternes, Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani, the artist's brother and a socialist politician who lived in exile in Paris after Mussolini's rise to power, brought together the remains of the two lovers in a grave at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. The rest is legend.