WTI Magazine #67    2015 September, 4
Author : Giovanni Verde      Translation by:

Symbol of wild and genius life, Amedeo Modigliani is one of the most revered contemporary Italian artists. His art and representation of the world of women went Beyond the world of painting and sculpture, up to defining an original conception of the universe, filtered by the lens of passion and suffering. Amedeo Modigliani was born in Livorno on July 12, 1884, to an Italian father born in Rome and a French mother, born in Marseille.

Since from adolescence, the Italian artist is plagued by health problems. Before he suffers of typhoid fever, then the onset of tuberculosis at age 16. His physical frailty forces him to stay long at home. For these reasons, soon Modigliani develops deep passion for drawing, filling pages and pages of sketches and portraits to the amazement of relatives, who cannot afford to enroll him in drawing courses suited to his level.

In 1906 Modigliani moves to Paris, the focal point of the vanguard, where he develops his own unique style, which starts from traces of cubism - a current he will never belong to - and then takes a totally original path.

The legend talks about his speed in the execution of portraits. Who assists to his work tells about paintings completed sometimes in just one sitting, and never retouched. A human and spiritual adventure that would hit the models, many of which define posing for him as "being stripped of her own soul". Famous and unique are his paintings of women from the elongated neck.

His life i salso characterized by the tormented relationship with passions and vices. In December 1917 Modigliani receives a letter from a former lover, Simone Thiroux, a French-Canadian girl, who informs him that she has got back in Canada and given birth to a son, his son. Modigliani will never recognize the child as his and finds the great, true love, in Jeanne Hebuterne, a budding artist, with whom he moves to Provence, while she's pregnant: on November 29, 1918 she gives birth to a girl, also named Jeanne.

The relationship of Modigliani with drugs, alcohol and other excesses are often amplified by oldest prejudices, difficult to remove. There is evidence of this tendency, certainly reliable, but there also are a lot of clichés. Modigliani is not the only one, in a place like Montparnasse during the first world war, to abuse of alcohol and hashish; indeed, those trends were common to most. What struck in the excesses of Modigliani would rather be their being that blatant.

On the morning of January 20, 1920 Modigliani, destroyed by tuberculosis and alcohol, gets hit by tubercular meningitis. There is nothing more to do. At dawn on January 24, 1920, Amedeo Modigliani dies at the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris.

The conception of his painting based on linear design, the purity of its archaic sculpture and his troubled romantic life of misery and illness make of Modigliani an outstanding personality in the framework of modern art, isolated from the currents of contemporary taste while working in their same period.

Today, Modigliani is universally regarded as one of the greatest artists of the XX century and his works are exhibited in the greatest museums of the world. Original and unique is his conception of life. He is credited with this quote: "Life is a gift: from the few to the many: from those who know and who have to those who do not know and who do not have".