a Modo di Modì

The works of the Livorno-born Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) are easily recognizable by his style: his portraits feature elongated faces, simplified features, pupilless eyes, and arched necks.

He is so famous for painting these characteristics that the medical diagnosis of pseudo-goiter, which involves a swelling of the neck and a slight curvature, is also known as 'Modigliani syndrome'.

Despite the success his paintings enjoy today, he lived a difficult life. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 35 in Paris, in deep poverty and, reportedly, forced to offer his work in exchange for a warm meal.

Paradoxically, his paintings today sell for astronomical prices: 95 years after his death, one of his paintings was sold for 170.4 million dollars, making it one of the most expensive paintings ever sold.

At the age of 24, Modigliani moved to Paris and settled in Le Bateau-Lavoir, a commune for penniless artists in Montmartre, but he was determined not to look like a poor immigrant.

He dressed elegantly and decorated his studio with plush drapes and Renaissance reproductions.

However, a year after his arrival in Paris, he transformed into a bohemian artist, letting his clothes and his studio fall into disarray, and even destroying some of his earlier works, describing them as 'childish trinkets, made when I was a dirty bourgeois.'

His friends began calling him Modì (a play on words with the French term 'maudit,' meaning cursed).

Modigliani is famous above all for his nudes, which were largely commissioned by his friend and art dealer Léopold Zborowski.

In 1917, Modigliani held his first and only solo exhibition, which caused a huge scandal due to its content, deemed sensationalist and shocking.

Despite the popularity of his paintings, Modigliani had always considered himself a sculptor.

For a year, he was a disciple of the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, whose radically simplified forms, evocative of tribal art, had a huge influence on Amedeo's sculptures.

Unfortunately, his career as a sculptor was short-lived, as his looming illness caused his physical strength to decline.

He nevertheless managed to exhibit a series of his works at the 1912 Salon d'Automne; nearly a century later, in 2010, one of his sculptures, Tête — a sixty-centimeter-tall limestone piece depicting a woman's head with a tribal mask — became the third most expensive sculpture ever sold.

Just like his contemporaries — Edvard Munch, Chaim Soutine, or Pablo Picasso — Modigliani created an expressive geometry, reducing the face to its fundamental details.

He focused more on style than on reality, while still maintaining a sense of emotion and a certain atmosphere, helping to define modern painting with his unique style.

Between 1916 and 1917, the controversial Modigliani painted several female nudes, beautiful and seductive; however, this is a far cry from how his work was perceived in early twentieth-century Paris.

This directness in Modigliani's approach to the female nude is precisely what prompted the police to shut down his 1917 exhibition at the Galerie Berthe Weill in Montmartre for public indecency.

Modigliani's last love was the beautiful art student Jeanne Hébuterne who, against her family's objections, went to live with the painter. The twenty-year-old Hébuterne gave birth to their daughter Jeanne in 1919 and became pregnant again the following year.

Unfortunately, Modigliani's health worsened until he died in January 1920 of tubercular meningitis. Eight months pregnant and grief-stricken, Hébuterne threw herself from a fifth-floor window.