Amedeo Modigliani. What is the uniqueness of the artist

The biography of Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is like a novel about a classical genius.

Life is short as a flash. Early death. The deafening posthumous glory that overtook him literally on the day of the funeral.

The price of the paintings that the artist left as payment for lunch in a cafe overnight reaches tens of millions of dollars!

And also the love of a lifetime. A beautiful young girl who looks like Princess Rapunzel. And the tragedy is worse than the story of Romeo and Juliet.

If it wasn't all true, I would have snorted: “Oh, this does not happen in life! Too twisted. Too emotional. Too tragic."

But everything happens in life. And this is just about Modigliani.

Unique Modigliani

Modigliani is mysterious to me like no other artist. For one simple reason. How did he manage to create almost all of his works in the same style, and so unique?

He worked in Paris, talked with Picasso, Matisse. Saw work Claude Monet и Gauguin. But he did not fall under anyone's influence.

It seems that he was born and lived on a desert island. And there he wrote all his works. Unless I saw African masks. Also, maybe a couple of works by Cezanne and El Greco. And the rest of his painting has almost no impurities.

If you look at the early works of any artist, you will understand that at first he was looking for himself. Modigliani's contemporaries often began with impressionism. how Picasso or Munch... And even Malevich.

Sculpture and El Greco

In Modigliani, you will not find this period of searching for yourself. True, his painting changed a little after he had been sculpting for 5 years.

Here are two works created before and after the sculptural period.

It is immediately evident how much Modigliani's sculpture transfers into painting. His famous elongation also appears. And a long neck. And deliberately sketchy.

He really wanted to continue sculpting. But since childhood, he had sick lungs: tuberculosis returned time after time. And stone and marble chips aggravated his illness.

Therefore, after 5 years, he returned to painting.

I would also venture to look for a link between the works of Modigliani and the works of El Greco. And it's not just about the elongation of faces and figures.

For El Greco, the body is a thin shell through which the human soul shines through.

Amedeo followed the same path. After all, the people in his portraits bear little resemblance to real ones. Rather, it conveys character, soul. Adding something that a person did not see in the mirror. For example, asymmetry of the face and body.

This can also be seen in Cezanne. He also often made the eyes of his characters different. Look at the portrait of his wife. We seem to read in her eyes: “What did you come up with again? You make me sit here with a stump ... "

Portraits of Modigliani

Modigliani painted people. Completely ignored still lifes. His landscapes are extremely rare.

He has many portraits of friends and acquaintances from his entourage. They all lived, worked and played in the Montparnasse district of Paris. Here, impoverished artists rented the cheapest housing and went to the nearest cafes. Alcohol, hashish, festivities until the morning.

Amedeo especially took care of the unsociable and sensitive Chaim Soutine. A slovenly, reserved and very original artist: his whole essence is before us.

Eyes looking in different directions, crooked nose, different shoulders. And also the color scheme: brown-gray-blue. Table with very long legs. And a tiny glass.

In all this one reads loneliness, inability to live. Well, truthfully, without flattery.

Amedeo wrote not only friends, but also unfamiliar people.

He does not have a predominance of one emotion. Like, make fun of everyone. To be touched - so everyone.

Here, over this couple, he is clearly ironic. A gentleman in years marries a girl of humble birth. For her, this marriage is an opportunity to solve financial problems.

The fox slit of sly eyes and slightly vulgar earrings help to read her nature. And what about the groom, do you know?

Here he has a collar raised on one side, lowered on the other. He does not want to think sensibly next to the bride full of youth.

But the artist infinitely regrets this girl. The combination of her open look, folded arms and slightly clumsy legs tells us about extreme naivety and defenselessness.

Well, how not to feel sorry for such a child!

As you can see, each portrait is a whole world of people. Reading their characters, we can even guess their fate. For example, the fate of Chaim Soutine.

Alas, although he will wait for recognition, but being already very sick. Failure to take care of himself will lead him to stomach ulcers and extreme emaciation.

And worries about Nazi persecution during the war will drive him to the grave.

But Amedeo will not know about this: he will die 20 years earlier than his friend.

Women of Modigliani

Modigliani was a very attractive man. An Italian of Jewish origin, he was charming and sociable. Women, of course, could not resist.

He had many. Including he is credited with a short affair with Anna Akhmatova.

She denied it for the rest of her life. Many of Amedeo's drawings presented to her with her image simply disappeared. Because they were in Nu style?

But some still survived. And according to them, we assume that these people had closeness.

But the main woman in Modigliani's life was Jeanne Hebuterne. She was madly in love with him. He also had tender feelings for her. So tender that he was ready to marry.

He also painted dozens of her portraits. And among them, not a single Nu.

I call her Princess Rapunzel because she had very long and thick hair. And as is usually the case with Modigliani, her portraits are not very similar to the real image. But her character is readable. Calm, reasonable, infinitely loving.

Amedeo, although he was the soul of the company, behaved somewhat differently with loved ones. Drinking, hashish is half the battle. He could flare up when drunk.

Zhanna easily coped with this, calming her angry lover with her words and gestures.

And here is her last portrait. She is pregnant with her second child. Which, alas, was not destined to be born.

Returning from a cafe drunk with friends, Modigliani unbuttoned his coat. And got a cold. His lungs, weakened by tuberculosis, could not stand it - he died the next day from meningitis.

And Jeanne was too young and in love. She didn't give herself time to recover from the loss. Unable to bear the eternal separation from Modigliani, she jumped out the window. Being in the ninth month of pregnancy.

Their first daughter was taken in by Sister Modigliani. Growing up, she became her father's biographer.

Nu Modigliani

Most Nu Modigliani created in 1917-18. It was an order from an art dealer. Such works were bought well, especially after the death of the artist.

So most of them are still in private collections. I managed to find one in the Metropolitan Museum (New York).

See how the body of the model is cut off by the edges of the picture in the area of ​​​​the elbows and knees. So the artist brings her closer to the viewer. She enters his personal space. Yes, no wonder that such works are well bought.

In 1917, an art dealer put on an exhibition of these nudes. But an hour later it was closed, considering Modigliani's work indecent.

What? And this is in 1918? When nudes were written by everyone and sundry?

Yes, we wrote a lot. But ideal and abstract women. And this means the presence of one important detail - smooth armpits without hair. Yes, that's what the cops were confused about.

So the lack of hair removal turned out to be the main sign of whether the model is a goddess or a real woman. Is it worthy to be shown to the public or should it be removed from sight.

Modigliani is unique even after death

Modigliani is the most copied artist in the world. For every original, there are 3 fakes! This is a unique situation.

How is that?

It's all about the life of an artist. He was very poor. And as I already wrote, he often paid with paintings for lunches in cafes. Did the same van Gogh, you say.

But the latter kept a thorough correspondence with his brother. It was from the letters that a complete catalog of Van Gogh's originals was compiled.

But Modigliani did not record his work. And he became famous on the day of his funeral. Unscrupulous art dealers took advantage of this, and an avalanche of fakes flooded the market.

And there were several such waves, as soon as the prices of Modigliani's paintings jumped once again.

Until now, there is not a single reliable catalog of the works of this brilliant artist.

Therefore, the situation with the exhibition in Genoa (2017), when most of the master's works turned out to be fake, is far from the last.

We can only rely on our intuition when we look at his work at exhibitions ...

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