Female Nude, c.1916, by Amedeo Modigliani © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London.
Amedeo Modigliani painted people. In many ways this concise statement sums up the artist’s entire output during his short career in Paris in the first two decades of the twentieth century. No other modern artist concentrated so absolutely on the representation of people. Moreover, in a period when avant-garde art was experimenting with the breakdown of forms, Modigliani steadfastly retained their integrity.
Always individual and idiosyncratic, he drew on a variety of sources – Renaissance to Rococo painting, the art of Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne and Brancusi, ancient Greek, African and Asian sculpture – to create his own highly original and modern signature style.
Modigliani’s life story, as told by his contemporaries and biographers since his premature death at the age of 35 in 1920, has tended to overshadow his achievement as an artist. Born into a cultivated Sephardic Jewish family from Livorno in Tuscany, Modigliani studied in his native town and in Florence and Venice, before moving to Paris in 1906. The riveting story of the handsome and dissolute young bohemian’s life in the French capital, brought to an end by a combination of ill health, alcohol consumption and drug abuse, has acquired legendary status. His restlessness was not, however, reflected in his art, which, if sometimes poignant, has none of the nervous expressionistic energy of that of many of his contemporaries. Apart from a handful of landscapes painted in the south of France in 1918, Modigliani’s paintings are restricted to portraits and nudes, most of which were painted in the last six years of his career, between 1913 and 1919.
Modigliani’s friend, the sculptor Jacob Epstein, said: ‘The legend of the debauched artist is just a legend. What legend gives us is an implausible caricature of a man, a painter who left behind only a body of legends. Amedeo Modigliani left behind a life’s work in art.’
Modigliani’s life story, as told by his contemporaries and biographers since his premature death at the age of 35 in 1920, has tended to overshadow his achievement as an artist. Born into a cultivated Sephardic Jewish family from Livorno in Tuscany, Modigliani studied in his native town and in Florence and Venice, before moving to Paris in 1906. The riveting story of the handsome and dissolute young bohemian’s life in the French capital, brought to an end by a combination of ill health, alcohol consumption and drug abuse, has acquired legendary status. His restlessness was not, however, reflected in his art, which, if sometimes poignant, has none of the nervous expressionistic energy of that of many of his contemporaries. Apart from a handful of landscapes painted in the south of France in 1918, Modigliani’s paintings are restricted to portraits and nudes, most of which were painted in the last six years of his career, between 1913 and 1919.
Modigliani’s friend, the sculptor Jacob Epstein, said: ‘The legend of the debauched artist is just a legend. What legend gives us is an implausible caricature of a man, a painter who left behind only a body of legends. Amedeo Modigliani left behind a life’s work in art.’
Fuente: http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/
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Amadeo Modigliani
Pintor y escultor italiano, destacó por la elegancia y simplicidad de sus retratos y desnudos femeninos. Nació en Livorno, creció en el barrio judío y tuvo tuberculosis siendo aún un niño. Estudió arte en Florencia y en 1906 se trasladó a París, donde entabló contacto con Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau y otros vanguardistas de la época. En París Modigliani llevó una vida frívola, temeraria, que poco a poco le fue mermando la salud. Su talento como artista, sin embargo, nunca fue puesto en duda por sus compañeros. Recibió la influencia del fauvismo y poco después también la de su amigo el escultor rumano Constantin Brancusi. Las primeras obras de Modigliani son esculturas inspiradas en las máscaras africanas, aunque realizó también algún que otro cuadro. Las pinturas de Modigliani, suaves y delicadas, se caracterizan por su simplificación, sus líneas sinuosas, las formas planas y las proporciones alargadas. La mayor parte de su obra la integran retratos y estudios de la figura humana, caracterizados por los rostros ovalados que tan popular le hicieron. Los retratos, aunque de gran simplicidad en los contornos, revelan un considerable discernimiento psicológico y un curioso sentido del patetismo. Alcanzó, en su mejor obra, una mezcla del dinamismo de la escultura africana y la gracia y refinamiento del estilo renacentista de Botticelli.
Fuente: http://www.epdlp.com
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