Amedeo  Modigliani 
Birth Year : 1884
Death Year : 1920
Country : Italy

Amedeo Modigliani was born in Italy in the Livorno ghetto. His father, a ruined banker, 
died young and his mother, a descendant of the Dutch philosopher, Spinoza, encouraged her 
delicate son in his aptitude for art, sending him to study in Florence and Venice and to 
visit museums throughout Italy. When Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1907, he had a small 
inheritance from a rich uncle, but he was already seriously ill with tuberculosis. 
Handsome, talented, sensitive, and extremely proud of his Jewish heritage, Modigliani 
became one of the most notorious characters in Montmartre and was soon penniless and often 
homeless. He frequently slept and worked in the studios of artist friends who liked him 
and recognized his great talent as both a painter and a sculptor. He moved to Montparnasse 
in 1913 and kept body and soul together by selling drawings in cafes for infinitesimal sums.
 Finally, in 1917, he married Jeanne Hebuterne and the couple set up housekeeping in a 
miserable garret. It was too late for this more normal life to conquer the ravages of 
consumption. Modigliani died in a Paris hospital on a January day in 1920. His desperate 
widow threw herself from the roof of her parents' apartment house on the day of his 
funeral, leaving their daughter to be reared by her maternal grandparents. Two years later 
Modigliani's art was discovered by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the great art collector of 
Pennsylvania. Considered the leader of the School of Paris, Modigliani's subjective and 
expressive art reveals his basic dignity, his despair, and a feeling of haunting 
melancholy. His earliest paintings were slightly influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec, but the 
bulk of his surviving works dating from 1915 to 1920 indicate his interest in African
sculpture, in Cezanne, and the Cubist works of Braque and Picasso and in the 
simplification of form that he learned from the sculptor Brancusi. The influences of his
 Italian heritage also appear in his paintings: the Italian Mannerism. These combined 
in his elegant, sinuous, linear style to produce easily recognized portraits and nudes 
with long slender oval heads, sloping shoulders, and extremely subtle coloration that is 
less important than line and composition. Within the framework of this mannered stylization
a great variety of distinct personalities, poetic in mood, with a constant swanlike grace.
