Amedeo Modigliani Prints

About Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani was born in Livorno in July 1884 into a Sephardic Jewish family and studied painting there under Guglielmo Micheli from 1898, then at the academies in Florence and Venice. He arrived in Paris in 1906, lived in Montmartre and later Montparnasse, and between 1909 and 1914 worked mainly as a sculptor, carving elongated heads in limestone under the influence of Constantin Brâncuși and of African and archaic art; the material shortages of the war and his poor health sent him back to painting. The portraits and nudes of his last five years, with their long necks, almond eyes and tilted oval faces, came from that sculptural simplification. The series of reclining nudes was painted from about 1916 to 1919 for the dealer Léopold Zborowski, who paid him by the day and supplied the models; his only solo exhibition, in December 1917, was closed by the police on its opening day over the nudes in the window. He spent part of 1918 in Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer, and died in Paris of tubercular meningitis in January 1920, aged thirty-five, followed two days later by his partner Jeanne Hébuterne. Modigliani's pictures are built from a few sweeping curves and warm, earthy colour, and on a wall they read as calmly as the carved heads they grew from.