Amadeo Modigliani A Great Painter – Sculptor

Amadeo Modigliani is the Italian Jew painter and sculptor, the drunk, the womanizer, the consummate and notorious bohemian, the man whose name always awakes these eyeless portraits to our mind, the legendary Modigliani.

Born and raised in a well-educated family who praised his incline to art form an early age.  He was acquainted to Nietzsche and Baudelaire from an early age and was indulged by his corrupted beauty and divine impulse to nature and the Superman, a pet name in his early academic career. He lived in a port city which celebrated an open door policy and was in a way international unlike many other cities in Europe at that time, not even Paris.

One may understand this elegant Italian aristocratic born teenager, struggling with the xenophobia that may escaped the Parisian cafes, however he had to disguise himself for both his identity – nationality and his unfortunate illness from his early childhood.  Tuberculosis was widely feared those days, and people with the decease were outcaste, thus, the young Modigliani indulged in drinking and using drugs, to ease his pain and conceal his illness, so as not to isolate himself as an artist from his Parisian friends. So the prince of vagabonds entered the cafes introducing himself: “I am Modigliani, the Jew!”

So what did he eagerly strive for in his mystique style of portraits and drawings?

Modigliani besieged his early work to figure out theoretically, abstractly and pictorially how to deal with form and the figure.  It is without doubt that the Parisian style and impact wavered him into destroying his early work, which he described as “Childish baubles, done when I was a dirty bourgeois”.  He was undoubtedly inspired by the popular Museum of Anthropology where he met with the Art of North Africa and Cycladic art which prominently take figure in his later paintings.  He was agonously stepping all his work to this direction, as all his paintings is expectant of his subtly recognized style the famous Modigliani portraiture.

“Portrait of a Polish Woman” is one of the many portraits of Modigliani that share the common but unique qualities of a Modigliani aesthetics. As universally recognized, with the long faced, almond eyes and tiny mouthed thick neck and curved elbows is a painting that catches the moment and distills and condenses time and life and style, in a chord of a Mediterranean aptitude. It is besides the passion for Art that these paintings that sold for ten dollars each at the time, and were even used by one of Modigliani’s landlords to patch mattresses, that in 2004 sold for over thirty million dollars. It is one of art’s obscure lunacies, however the substantial amount, and that most Museums bare one of Modigliani’s paintings, we need to recognize the endeavors of the artists attempts and appreciate his ‘tongue’ of language.  Modigliani shares a magnitude that is beyond the modernization of African culture and style, he magnetizes the eye with the empty eyes trying to reach and trace the illustrated character’s soul.  He captivates with authenticity the acclaim of the personage and mesmerizes the observer to a story that resembles a still life, a motionless picture, hence, slightly moving about, almost breathing.  The sophisticated pintor enthralls his subject and translates it to the Modigliani dialectal and morphological charm to a prospered psychological reproduction and ‘photograph’ the feminine side in his unique way.

He is depicting in his long lasting endeavor in life which he left as early as thirty five years old.  He managed to mature in a hard and rigid manner early in his life due to the harshness of his time and health condition, however gifting society and art lovers with an ancestry that is called the Modigliani chapter.

“It’s almost like this global consciousness way before the word ‘global,’” says art curator Mason Klein. “That was a prescient moment—a unifying rather than an alienating aspect, which is very relevant to today.”  Modigliani always ahead of his time, and always current to the present day, beholds a tradition that little artists held alike.

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