Amedeo Modigliani was one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th century. His works are so original and unmistakable that even non-experts can spot them at a glance. Most are beautiful female portraits, and they stand out immediately for their elongated necks and stylised faces.
Impossible not to notice them, and yet the real hallmark of Modigliani’s paintings lies above all in the eyes.
Yes, because in almost all his portraits Modigliani very often painted eyes with no pupils, oddly glassy, a choice that has fuelled the most varied interpretations. On one hand there are those who read into it a deep difficulty in relating to women. A more “poetic” reading, instead, holds that Modigliani would not paint his models’ eyes until he had understood their soul.
But who was Modigliani?
It may sound like a trivial question, and yet one of the most fascinating things about this artist is precisely his life. Not only did Modigliani die very young, but his whole existence was marked by an intense lifestyle of illness, study, love affairs and excess.
That is why he went down in history as a true cursed artist.
Care to know more?
Well, below you’ll find everything about Amedeo Modigliani that will help you understand the man behind the artist, along with a few important curiosities.
Let’s dive in!
Who was Modigliani: the artist’s origins
Amedeo Modigliani was born on 12 July 1884 in Livorno, to an Italian father (Flaminio) and a French mother (Eugénie Garsin, from a Sephardic Jewish family in Marseille). His once well-off family was on the brink of financial collapse because of the bankruptcy of his father’s money-changing business.
Here’s a Modigliani anecdote not everyone knows.
The story goes that his mother gave birth while the bailiffs were in the house and, since the law forbade seizing anything lying on the bed of a woman in labour, little Amedeo came into the world surrounded by all the family’s valuables piled onto the mattress. It’s a tale no one can confirm, but it captures the atmosphere of that cultured, penniless household perfectly.
Nicknamed Dedo at home, Modigliani fell in love with painting as a teenager: he first studied at home, and in 1898 he began attending the studio of the Livornese painter Guglielmo Micheli.
After an illness he travelled with his mother to recover his health, from the South (Naples, Rome, Capri) up to Tuscany: in 1902 he studied in Florence, at the Scuola Libera del Nudo, and the following year he moved to Venice, to the Academy of Fine Arts, where he steeped himself in the great Venetian masters of colour.
Modigliani in Paris
Despite his frail health, he decided to move to Paris in 1906. Like so many other penniless artists he settled in Montmartre, the district of cheap studios, before moving around 1909 to Montparnasse, the new capital of bohemian life.
Here he struck up friendships with the leading figures of the avant-garde: Pablo Picasso, the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, the painter Maurice Utrillo and above all Chaïm Soutine, whom he met around 1913 and with whom he shared a studio for a while at the Cité Falguière. Two other giants he never got to meet: Cézanne and Toulouse-Lautrec had already died by the time he reached Paris, yet their painting was a decisive reference point for him (it was Cézanne’s great 1907 retrospective that struck him like lightning).
In Paris he led a poor life that often forced him to return to his family. His situation was so precarious that he sometimes paid for his drinks by sketching small pencil portraits, the famous “dessins à boire”, literally “drawings for a drink”.
Not everyone knows that, before devoting himself definitively to painting, Modigliani was passionate about sculpture. Encouraged by his friend Brancusi, between 1909 and 1914 he carved a series of stone heads and caryatids with elongated features, inspired by African art and “primitive” masks. It was his lung disease that stopped him: the stone dust was unbearable and, with the outbreak of war in 1914, he set down his chisel to return to the brush and develop the style we all recognise today.
Poverty and fragile health certainly did not stop him from having a turbulent love life full of excess. If that side of him sounds “strange”, bear in mind that for an artist of the time drinking heavily or using opiates was hardly rare: it was in fact quite common.
Modigliani and the cursed artists
He became part of the avant-garde and of the so-called cursed artists, so much so that his nickname became Modì, from the first letters of his surname but with a pronunciation that echoes the French word maudit, meaning cursed.
Modigliani had an impulsive personality, prone to fits of rage. The story goes that one night he got into a brawl with Utrillo, with whom he’d been drinking, to settle who was the better painter: they were found the next morning asleep, arm in arm, on the pavement. This too is one of those anecdotes to take with a smile, but it captures the spirit of those years.
It was in this period that he devoted himself entirely to painting, from 1914 onwards.
Here are two very curious things about Modigliani’s works.
The first concerns his speed: he was said to be able to finish a portrait in two sittings at most and to almost never retouch his work.
The second concerns his first (and only) solo exhibition, held at Berthe Weill’s gallery in December 1917. It was a real scandal: on opening day itself the police intervened because the nudes displayed in the window, with their clearly visible pubic hair, were judged an outrage to public decency. The dealer had to remove the canvases from the window and the show, though it limped on, brought almost no sales. Today those very nudes are among the most expensive paintings in the world.
The women of Amedeo Modigliani
Modigliani had an intense love life and more than one child from different relationships (including a son he never wished to recognise). But the woman of his life was Jeanne Hébuterne, a young painter and model he met in the spring of 1917, nicknamed by her fellow art students “noix de coco”, coconut, for the contrast between her extremely pale complexion and her dark hair.
Their relationship was so turbulent and full of excess that their furious rows became famous throughout the neighbourhood.
On 29 November 1918, in Nice, their daughter was born, also named Jeanne, whom Modigliani acknowledged as his own. Shortly afterwards, when business was starting to go a little better, he pledged to marry Jeanne Hébuterne, who was expecting a second child. She stayed by his side both in Paris and in the South of France until his premature death.
How Modigliani died
You should know that, from a very young age, Modigliani never enjoyed good health, which grew even worse because of his dissolute habits as a bohemian artist.
Frail since boyhood (as a child he had pleurisy, then typhoid, and contracted tuberculosis around the age of sixteen) and being the youngest at home, he was also the most cosseted of the siblings; as an adult, instead, he was repeatedly forced to return to Italy or leave Paris to recover his strength. The most important of these moves was to Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1918, where Modigliani painted the very few landscapes (barely three or four) of his entire career.
Tuberculosis finally got the better of him: Modigliani died on 24 January 1920, aged just 35, of tubercular meningitis.
Today he is buried at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, beside his beloved Jeanne Hébuterne, who took her own life two days after him: eight months pregnant, she threw herself from the fifth floor of her parents’ home. She was buried at his side only about a decade later. Their daughter, Jeanne Modigliani (1918-1984), left an orphan, was raised by her father’s family in Florence and as an adult wrote one of the first serious biographies of her father, Modigliani: Man and Myth, trying to separate the man from the legend.
Why Modigliani didn’t paint the eyes
Modigliani’s portraits, with their large glassy eyes, are a way of representing the introspection of his subjects: the act of “looking inward” and not just at the world.
An interesting detail about Modigliani’s eyes comes from his portrait of the painter Léopold Survage, whom he depicted with one “living” eye and the other “blind”. When his friend asked why he had painted him that way, he is said to have replied:
I painted you like this because with one eye you look at the world, with the other you look inside yourself.
Looking at his paintings, you’ll easily notice his astonishing ability to capture the essence of those he portrays. It’s no coincidence that many of his sitters said that being painted by Modigliani was like “having your soul undressed”, a phrase that says a lot about the sensitivity of this artist. You’ll find that same inward gaze, in an entirely different key, in the golden portraits of Gustav Klimt, the other great chronicler of the female figure of those years.
The Livorno heads hoax
I’ll leave you with one of the funniest stories in 20th-century art, tied to his very hometown. In 1984, for the centenary of his birth, Livorno decided to dredge the Fosso Reale canal in pursuit of a legend: it was said that the young Modigliani, disheartened by the critics, had thrown some sculptures into it back in 1909. Three stone heads did indeed surface, and Italy’s top critics rushed to declare them authentic.
Too bad they were fakes. Soon after, three students confessed to having carved one with an ordinary Black & Decker drill, while a Livornese artist revealed he had made the other two as a prank at the “experts’” expense. A lesson in humility that travelled around the world, and still raises a smile today.
What Modigliani’s works are worth today
Modigliani died poor, and that is perhaps the cruellest twist of his story. Today his canvases are among the most sought-after on the art market: in 2015 his Nu couché (1917-18) was hammered down at Christie’s in New York for around 170 million dollars, and in 2018 another of his reclining nudes, Nu couché (sur le côté gauche), topped 157 million at Sotheby’s. Dizzying figures for a painter who once paid for a drink with a pencil sketch.
Where to see Modigliani’s works
Most of Modigliani’s works are today in private collections: his finest portraits, his nudes and his few surviving sculptures have reached extremely high value, both artistic and commercial.
If instead you’re wondering where to see Modigliani’s works without spending a fortune, a good part of the canvases is spread across some of the world’s most important museums:
- in Paris, the Musée de l’Orangerie holds a fine group of his portraits in the Jean Walter-Paul Guillaume collection (Paul Guillaume was in fact one of his dealers), while the Centre Pompidou keeps one of his rare carved stone heads;
- in Italy you can see a famous example at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan and other works at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome;
- abroad, he is well represented at MoMA and the Metropolitan in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Tate in London and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
If you’re passing through Paris, the easiest way to see them in person is to book the reserved-access ticket for the Musée de l’Orangerie: you skip the queue in the Tuileries gardens and, besides the Modiglianis, you find yourself in front of Monet’s Water Lilies.
And you, standing before a Modigliani portrait, what do you feel looking into those pupil-less eyes? Try lingering a moment longer next time: perhaps that’s exactly where he is “undressing your soul”.
