AMEDEO MODIGLIANI, 1884-1920

Παρουσίαση

Perhaps it is the name. Amedeo Modigliani - it sounds like an elegiac melody, like a well-chosen name for a tragic, poetic figure in a novel, and perhaps it also has something to do with the fact that Modigliani, who has always fired the imagination, was not a figure who called forth factual and sober description. And this sensual-sounding name is not even a pseudonym. Amedeo Modigliani is the name of the artist who was born on July 12, 1884, in Livomo (Leghorn), Italy, into a bourgeois Jewish family. His portraits and nudes were to become some of the most popular pictures of the twentieth century. No other painter of modern times has been as heavily burdened with as many legends, myths and cliches as Amedeo Modigliani. Novels and a play have been written about him, his Bohemian lifestyle has been excessively idealised in films, and art criticism is also full of glorifying anecdotes. In contrast to all of this is the very small number of authenticated documents about Modigliani's life, so that it really is not easy to recognise the true Modigliani under all of these fiction-like features. Entwined with the name of Modigliani are all manner of ideas about the Bohemian life in Paris, the fateful poverty of the artist and his grand passions. Modigliani is the prototype of the artist who executes his work in the draughty studios of Montmartre and Montparnasse, intoxicated by alcohol, hashish, love and poetry; who, around the time of World War I, lives in the artistic heart of Paris and at the same time stands isolated on the fringes of the belle epoque; who, in the capital city of the European avant-garde, surrounded by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Georges Braque (1882-1963), Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), never seems to waver in pursuing his own path; who experiences little or no success and is so poor that he can only just pay his bills in the legendary bars at the junction of the Montparnasse and Raspail boulevards with quickly sketched portraits of the customers; who dies - at the young age of 35 - of tuberculosis, penniless and emaciated at the end of a life which has been entirely devoted to art. To heighten the tragedy of his life even more, on the day after his death, his pregnant young fiancee, Jeannne Hebuterne, jumps from her parents' fifth-floor flat, leaving behind their small daughter as an orphan. [...] (From the publisher)

Περιεχόμενα

Fruitful Ideas
Columns of Tenderness
He was Our Aristocrat
The Second Temple of Beauty
Nothing But a Mute Affirmation of Life
Life and Work