Live fast, die young, and leave behind a beautiful corpse. Such is the legend of Italian 20th-century artist Amedeo Modigliani. If you generously mark the start of his career at age 14, when he first took art classes, this painter and sculptor was active for just two decades before dying of tubercular meningitis at age 35. But in that time, Modi (as his friends called him) brought a singular vision to his portraits and nudes.
Part of what made his work so distinctive was his personal amalgam of old-school styles from his native Italy, such as a rust-heavy color palette and Mannerist elongations, with the modernism of his time. “He was essentially a traditionalist,” wrote James Thrall Soby in the catalog for Modigliani’s 1951 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “who happened to have caught fire from the excitement of a contemporary idiom.”
In his portraits, Modigliani’s subject of choice, sitters are granted a degree of stylization that withholds clues about their station in life. Everyone, from wealthy doctors to the local barmaid, looks both highly individual and yet, at the same time, monumental.
“I was astonished once when Modigliani found someone—a conspicuously ugly person—beautiful,” Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, with whom Modigliani had a relationship around 1910, wrote in her memoir. “He insisted on it. It came to me then that he must see things completely differently than we did.”
Serene as his canvases were, in real life Modigliani was erratic and habitually broke. An alcoholic (who may have also been addicted to hashish), he nonetheless maintained an aristocratic air. And so, even after he died in a pauper’s hospital, a princely funeral procession escorted him to his final resting place at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
