Artist Modigliani. Biography and paintings of Amedeo Modigliani, an Italian impressionist artist. Amedeo Modigliani, biography and paintings

Late at night, Modigliani and Jeanne Hebuterne walked along the fence of the Luxembourg Gardens. Suddenly, an inhuman scream burst from his chest, reminiscent of the roar of a wounded animal. He rushed at Zhanna and shouted: “I want to live! Can you hear? I want to live!" started beating her. Then he grabbed me by the hair and pushed me with all my might onto the iron grating of the garden. Zhanna did not utter a single sound. Having slightly recovered from the blow, she stood up, walked up to Modigliani and took him by the hand. His sudden rage had already melted away like snow in the sun, and streams of tears were streaming down his face. “I don’t want to die,” he told Jeanne. “I don’t believe there’s anything there.”

“Maudie,” Zhanna said affectionately and very softly in the tone in which one would persuade a stubborn child, “I’ve told you about this so many times. Why do you still doubt it?” He trustingly clung to her, and after a couple of minutes the strange couple disappeared around a bend in the road.

Modigliani was fading. Lately he has changed beyond recognition and has become like a ghost: bony as a skeleton, with a bluish complexion and shaking hands. It was, of course, no secret to anyone - there are no secrets in Montparnasse - that Modi had tuberculosis, but this disease haunted him with early youth, and he knew how to cope with it under much worse circumstances. Rumors spread throughout Paris that since Modi became involved with Jeanne Hebuterne, she, like a vampire, is sucking his powerful life force out of Modigliani.

If not for this strength, he would have died in one of the Parisian ditches thirteen years ago. Then, in the fall of 1906, the spoiled dandy Amedeo, or Dedo at home, the scion of a once wealthy, but now impoverished Jewish family from the Italian town of Livorno, came to Paris. A handsome young man with curly black hair, dressed in a strict dark suit with a hard collar, a buttoned vest and a snow-white shirt with starched cuffs, in Montparnasse was at first mistaken for a stockbroker. Amedeo was extremely offended by this, because the broker was actually his father Flaminio Modigliani, which the young man did not want to talk about. He preferred to introduce himself as the son of a wealthy Roman banker and the great-grandson of Benedict Spinoza. ( maiden name one of the great-grandmothers, apparently, was in fact Spinoza. Which, in turn, gave reason to assume the presence of a family connection with the great philosopher. No more.)

From his early youth, Amedeo fancied himself an artist - he studied painting a little in Florence and Venice, but came to Paris in order to get acquainted with new art and, of course, become famous. Rarely has any aspiring artist been as confident in his talent as this handsome Italian. However, Montparnasse was teeming with unrecognized geniuses just like him, who came here from all over the world.

It turned out that in order to be an artist in Paris, one must not so much be able to draw as be able to lead a very special life. A miserable shed made of wooden planks and sheets of tin - this was Amedeo’s first home. The walls are covered with drawings and sketches; the furniture consists of two wicker chairs with broken legs found on the street. The bed was a rag thrown in the corner, and the table was an overturned box. Amedeo enthusiastically settled in new apartment in the end, the main thing is that he is now in Paris, and very soon he will become famous and then he will find something more decent for himself, and this shack will be turned into a museum. Amedeo knew that there was nothing to count on for help from his family - his father had left them long ago, and the money his mother sent him was barely enough for canvases and paints. In addition, Modigliani’s living conditions were generally ordinary for Montparnasse. Picasso's nearby studio, for example, was not much more luxurious.

Evgenia Garsen 1925

In Livorno, Amedeo was used to communicating with clean, well-bred young men from good families, I immediately had to make acquaintance with a very strange public: the Parisian artistic bohemia consisted for the most part of homosexuals, drug addicts, gigolos, religious fanatics of all directions, Kabbalists, mystics and simply crazy people. Fierce debates about art, which usually began in Picasso’s studio, were transferred to the famous Rotunda cafe, where the enthusiasm of the debaters was fueled by heavy doses of alcohol and hashish.

Once on Christmas Eve, Modigliani dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out free hashish lozenges at the entrance to the Rotunda cafe. Unaware of the presence of a “secret filling,” cafe visitors happily swallowed them. That evening, the intoxicated bohemians almost destroyed the Rotunda: representatives of the highest creative circles of Paris smashed lamps and doused the ceiling and walls with rum.

Soon Modigliani simply turned into Modi and every dog ​​in the area already knew him. (Modi, as he was often called by friends and colleagues, is phonetically the same as the French word maudit, which means “damned”). Since no one was willing to give a centime for his drawings, Modi soon had nothing to pay even for a shack. Sometimes he whiled away the nights under the table in a tavern, sometimes on a bench in the park, and then he settled for himself in an abandoned monastery behind Place Blanche, where he loved to work at night to the echoing accompaniment of the wind rushing through the eye sockets of the windows.

Modi had his own quirks, for which, by the way, many in Montparnasse respected him: for example, he preferred to go hungry, but, unlike others, he flatly refused to do work just for the sake of money - for example, painting signs. He was a great maximalist and did not want to waste his talent. More than once his comrades persuaded him to use a simple and reliable way to fill his stomach early in the morning, under the doors of wealthy townspeople, peddlers left their goods - buns, bacon, milk, coffee. A little dexterity and skill - and you are guaranteed a delicious breakfast. However, the proud and scrupulous Modigliani never agreed to participate in this.

Why did he endure such need? His paintings were considered “daubs” among artists; no one took them seriously. Offended by this attitude, Modigliani stopped going to Picasso and gradually moved away from his circle, especially since he was almost not interested in avant-garde art. In splendid isolation, he tried to give form on canvas or paper to what he vaguely felt, but did not yet know how to express.

Instead of the coveted glory of picturesqueness, this Italian Jew, handsome as an ancient god, very soon acquired the fame of the first lover in Montparnasse. The paradox was that poor Modi was not really interested in women at all. He was by no means a homosexual. but he looked at the young ladies only as more or less successful natures.

Every single one of his models stayed in his bed - prostitutes, maids, flower girls, washerwomen. Inviting the model to share a bed with him after a posing session was for Modigliani the same act of politeness as for a bourgeois offering tea to guests, and meant exactly the same - no more and no less. He did not want to enjoy, but to embody. He was looking for his painting material. However, women did not understand all these subtleties and took his gallantry at face value. That is, for love, or at least for being in love.

In the summer of 1910, newlyweds Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov arrived in Paris. At first sight, Akhmatova was captivated by this “sight of Montparnasse.” Modigliani seemed to her the most picturesque man she had ever seen: that day he was dressed in yellow corduroy trousers and a loose jacket of the same color. Instead of a tie, there is a bright orange silk bow, and around the belt there is a fiery red scarf. Running past with his usual blue folder with drawings, Modigliani also stopped his gaze on the elegant Russian. “A very, very curious nature,” he thought, and he smiled broadly, winked conspiratorially at the girl, then picked a flower from the flowerbed and threw it at her feet. Gumilyov stood next to Anna, but he only shrugged: he knew that here, in Montparnasse, the laws of generally accepted morality are abolished.

Modi never got hung up on women, they came into his life and left it, leaving his heart untouched: Madeleine, Natalie, Elvira, Anna, Marie - an endless string of beauties whose charms he immortalized with his canvases. Modigliani managed to live with one of them, the English journalist Beatrice Hastings, for two whole stormy years, but he saw her more as “his boyfriend” than his mistress. They drank together, rowded, fought and tore each other's hair out. And when Beatrice said that she had had enough of “all this exoticism,” Modi was not very upset.

Modigliani once confessed to his bosom friend, the sculptor Brancusi, that “he is waiting for one and only woman who will become his eternal true love and which often comes to him in a dream.” And then, on a dirty napkin that came to hand, I sketched a portrait of that “one and only.” Brancusi only remembered that she had straight, long hair.

Despite his stormy life and poor health, Modigliani’s energy was in full swing: he sometimes managed to paint several paintings a day, consumed such explosive mixtures of hashish and alcohol that they knocked out some big guys, participated in all kinds of carnivals, amusements, tomfoolery - in a word , lived to the fullest. He never ran out of enthusiasm and hope that he was about to be noticed, appreciated, discovered... After all, in the end, even the arrogant Picasso admitted that Modi had talent. Over time, Modigliani even acquired his own agent, the Pole Zborowski, who began to find buyers for his paintings. And suddenly, overnight, something seemed to break in Modi: a girl with long straight hair appeared on the horizon...

For the first time he saw her in the same “Rotunda”, where 19-year-old Jeanne Hebuterne, a student Art Academy Colarossi, I once wandered in with my friend to have an aperitif. Modigliani, who, as usual, took his favorite place at the counter, noticed a new face, fixed his gaze on him and stared at him for a long time.

This is how she saw herself before meeting Amadeo
(self-portrait painted by Jeanne in 1916)

And this is how I saw Amadeo:

“Sit like this,” he turned to Jeanne after a few minutes and immediately began sketching her portrait on a piece of paper. That same night they left the restaurant hugging - thus began one of the strangest love stories in Montparnasse. The day after they met, wherever Modi managed to wander during the day to have a glass - in the Rotunda, at Rosalie's, in the Agile Rabbit - he gave the impression of a completely crazy person. His eyes sparkled excitedly, he could not sit still and every now and then he jumped out of his chair and shouted: “No, listen!” The friends looked at each other in surprise: what happened to Modi? “I met the woman from my dreams! It's definitely her! - the artist repeated every now and then, as if someone were objecting to him. “I can prove to you: I have her portraits - an amazing resemblance!” Friends reacted to these speeches with cheerful laughter - of course, no one doubted that Modi would make such a joke. In Montparnasse it is not customary to talk seriously about eternal love. It's tasteless, bourgeois, and it makes everyone sick.

However, Jeanne really turned out to be Modigliani's woman, his ideal type. And he, of course, understood this at first sight. She did not need to artificially lengthen her neck and face shape, as she did when painting portraits of other women. Her entire silhouette seemed to be striving upward, elongated and thin, like a Gothic statue. Long, waist-length hair braided into two braids, blue almond-shaped eyes seemed to be looking somewhere above this mortal world and seeing something inaccessible to others. No one would call Jeanne a beauty, but there was something bewitching about her - everyone recognized it.

But what did the young girl find in a thirty-two-year-old emaciated half-tramp with the burning eyes of a tuberculosis patient? By 1917, when they met, Modi was no longer the romantic handsome man who had once attracted Akhmatova’s attention. The wild black curls thinned, the teeth - or rather, what was left of them - turned black. When Madame and Monsieur Hebuterne, respectable Catholic philistines, found out who their daughter had become involved with, they immediately threatened her with a parental curse if she did not immediately leave this dirty shaggy Jew. The father of the family, Achille-Casimir Hebuterne, held an extremely respectable, from his point of view, position as senior cashier in a haberdashery store. He wore hard collars, a black frock coat and was completely devoid of a sense of humor. The Hebuterns cherished the dream of raising their children - son Andre and daughter Jeanne - to be the same respectable people as they considered themselves.

...Now Modigliani appeared every day in the Rotunda or at Rosalie's in the company of Jeanne. As usual, he first drew visitors who attracted his attention in some way, offered his drawings to foreigners who wandered in to admire the local colorful society (Modi always asked for a meager payment, and if that did not suit the potential buyer, he immediately tore the drawing into small pieces before his eyes scraps). By nightfall, having gotten pretty drunk, he would certainly start bullying someone. But even if Modi got into a drunken fight, Zhanna did not make a single gesture to stop him, and looked at it with amazing dispassion. There was no fear or worry in her blue eyes. Around two in the morning, Modi was literally thrown out of the establishment by the scruff of the neck, like a naughty dog. After waiting a minute, Zhanna rose and followed him like a silent shadow.

Often they sat on a bench until the morning in complete silence, breathing in the cold night air and watching the stars gradually fade and give way to dawn. Modi began to doze off, then woke up again, until Zhanna pulled his sleeve - this meant that it was time to walk her home. Modi obediently followed Jeanne along the echoing and deserted Parisian boulevards to Rue Amio, where her parents lived, and then stood under the windows for a long time, listening to how, in the pre-dawn silence, the cries of Mother Hebuterne were heard throughout the entire neighborhood as she met her unlucky daughter at the threshold - “ a whore, a prostitute and a Jewish whore.”

He would have immediately taken her away from those pompous cretins of the Hebuternes, but where could Maudie bring Jeanne? In cheap hotel rooms with bedbugs and cockroaches? On park benches?

Soon, however, the problem was resolved - Modigliani's friend and agent Monsieur Zborovsky made a broad gesture, offering to pay for an apartment for him in the house where he lived, for which the artist undertook to supply him with at least two paintings or drawings a week. Zbo had no doubt at all that Modigliani was a talent who needed to be supported in every possible way, and that someday these idiot collectors would understand who should have been bought in Paris.

At the beginning of 1917, Modi and Jeanne moved to the Rue de la Grande Chaumière. And the next day, Modi threw a huge feast at Rosalie’s restaurant: on the occasion of a housewarming, Zborovsky lent money to Modigliani. Suddenly, Simone Thiru, an artist and model, Modi’s former girlfriend, appeared in the doorway, surrounded by a gang of her friends. Everyone was wary. Red-haired Simone was advancing straight towards Jeanne, her huge belly thrust forward. “Do you know, doll, that here he is,” pointing at Modi and tapping his stomach, “the father of this unfortunate child?” “You slept with me exactly as much as with everyone else here! So make someone else happy with your child! - Modi shouted, jumping up from his chair. - I recognize the child only from her! - Modi pointed to Zhanna. “Only she alone will carry my children!” People around me looked at each other in bewilderment - Modi behaved completely inappropriately. Firstly, everyone knew that he lived with Simone for a long time, and it is very likely that the child she is carrying is from him; besides, such a story was very ordinary in Montparnasse - here they often could not figure out who was giving birth to whom. If Modi had recognized the child with the same equanimity with which he drank a glass of brandy, it would have seemed normal.

Everyone around, including Simone, knew perfectly well that there was absolutely nothing to take from him, so he would have admitted it and that would have been the end of it. Most likely, Simone was expecting something like this, but Modigliani began to scream, and Jeanne looked at her and was silent. Simone caught her emotionless mysterious look, and suddenly she became scared. “You are a witch! She hissed like a cat to her rival. - Or crazy!" she added quickly: “God will curse both you and your children.” “And you, handsome,” Simone said, turning to Modi, “your goddess will quickly bring you to your grave. So see you in the next world!” And Simone coughed desperately - she, like Modigliani, suffered from tuberculosis.

On page 99 of the book “Modigliani: Man and Myth” by Amedeo Modigliani’s daughter, there is an interesting footnote in which it is reported that Simone Thiroux died in Paris. Simone posed for Modigliani. She fell in love with him, but the feelings were unrequited. When the girl became pregnant, Amedeo refused to recognize himself as the father of the child. She gave birth to a boy that Modigliani did not even want to hear about. After Simone's death, the boy was adopted by a French family.

With the advent of Jeanne, Modigliani’s life not only did not return to a calm direction, but, on the contrary, completely went wrong. Now, instead of taking up his brush in the morning, Modi tried to quickly escape the break, leaving his Jeanne completely alone all day. He wandered from one cafe to another, selling his hastily made drawings to someone and buying himself a drink with these pitiful centimes. Modi soon lost the ability to work sober. After midnight, Zhanna would look for him in one of the drinking establishments, and often at the police station, and bring him home. She undressed him, washed him, put him to bed, without uttering a single reproach. They spoke strangely little to each other at all.

It was not Zhanna, whom Modi called his wife, but Zborovsky, from early in the morning, before Modi had time to sneak away, who began to beg him to “work a little.” Modi was capricious, shouting that he could not write in a room “icy like the steppes of Siberia”! Zbo brought firewood, it became hot, like hell, and then Modi “remembered” that he had no paints. Zbo ran for paints. At this time, some naked model was patiently watching all this, perched in the corner of a hard, uncomfortable sofa. Hanka, Zbo’s wife, came running, worried that her husband was staring at a naked girl for too long (and she was also angry that Modigliani painted “all sorts of stupid sheep” and not her). Among this bedlam, screams, cries and persuasion, only Zhanna maintained complete equanimity. She was either quietly cooking something in another room, or drawing. Her face, as usual, remained completely clear and serene.

It usually ended with Zbo personally bringing a bottle of rum from a nearby store. He understood that if Modi stopped working completely, then tomorrow he and Zhanna would have nothing to eat. Zbo has almost no Modi drawings left that could be quickly sold, so he will have to once again run to the pawn shop and pawn his last summer suit. Otherwise, his crazy lovebirds will die of hunger.

Having drained the glass, Modi took up his brush with curses. Every five minutes he would break into a coughing fit and spit out blood as if he wanted to spit out his insides. But even these heartbreaking sounds did not cause any signs of concern in Zhanna.

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (Italian, 1884-1920) “Portrait of Leopold Zborowski” 1916-17
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (Italian, 1884-1920) “Anna (Hanka) Zabrowska”

One day, when Modi, as usual, disappeared somewhere, Zborovsky and his wife almost forcibly dragged Zhanna to their place. In two voices, worried and interrupting each other, they began to explain to her that Modi needed to be saved, that he was dying: from drunkenness, progressive tuberculosis, and most importantly, he was losing faith in his talent. Zhanna listened to them politely, took a sip from a cup of tea, and raised her Blue eyes, shrouded in some kind of mystical veil, and said with soft confidence: “You just don’t understand - Modi definitely needs to die.” They stared at her in shock. “He is a genius and an angel,” Zhanna continued calmly. “When he dies, everyone will immediately understand it.” The Zborovskys looked at each other in fear and hastened to move the conversation to another topic.

The First World War was going on. The bombing of Paris began. Montparnasse was empty - everyone who could went to the front. Modigliani was also eager, but foreigners, especially those with tuberculosis, were not accepted into the army. During air raids on the city, Modi and Zhanna could often be seen on the street - they calmly walked under exploding shells and were in no hurry to take refuge in a bomb shelter...

Immediately after the end of the war, the demand for Modigliani's paintings suddenly increased; Not last role A large exhibition of French painting, which opened in the summer of 1919 in London, played a role in this. For the first time, critics paid attention not only to the paintings of Picasso and Matisse, but also to the paintings of Modigliani. Now Zborowski gave Modi 600 francs a month (for comparison: a very decent soup lunch, meat dish, vegetables, cheese and a liter of wine cost approximately one franc twenty-five centimes)! With this amount, a moderate person could lead a completely prosperous life, but Modi, who had dreamed of wealth all his life, was now completely indifferent to money.

The same applied to his beloved - despite the fact that their daughter was born in November 1918, Zhanna showed no need for new furniture, decent clothes, or toys for the baby. And Modi, having received another sum from Zborovsky, immediately went with one of his countless friends to restaurants. Now just one drink was enough for Amedeo to fall into a deranged state and begin to destroy tables and dishes. When the aggressive mood left him, he started a new show: he pulled out the remaining banknotes from his trouser pocket and scattered them like fireworks on the heads of visitors.

Modigliani became more and more obsessed with the idea own death. His health was deteriorating every day, but he didn’t want to hear about doctors or treatment. I gave up work completely. Like a ghost, Modi wandered the streets of Paris and tormented everyone with endless whining: “That’s it, I’m finished! Do you know that I’m definitely finished now?” Zhanna looked for him at night and more than once found him lying in a ditch, sometimes in an embrace with the same drunken prostitutes.

At the beginning of the winter of 1920, Modigliani came to Rosalie, poured himself some brandy, solemnly saying: “For the repose of Modigliani’s soul,” drank it in one gulp and suddenly began a funeral Jewish prayer, which he had heard as a child in Livorno. Zborovsky, who arrived in time, with difficulty pulled the reluctant Modigliani out of the restaurant, brought him home and forcibly put him to bed. Zhanna went somewhere, Zbo went into the next room for something and... froze in horror: on the chairs stood two unfinished canvases of Zhanna - on one she lay dead; on the other, she committed suicide...

When Zbo returned to Modi’s room, Zhanna was already sitting at the patient’s bedside: they were serenely talking about something. An hour later, Modi began to become delirious, and Zbo decided without wasting time to take him to a hospital for the poor.

There Modigliani was diagnosed with meningitis due to tuberculosis. He suffered terribly and was given an injection, after which Modi never recovered. When the doctors came out to announce that Modigliani had died, Jeanne calmly smiled, nodded her head and said: “I know.” Entering the room (Jeanne was about to give birth again and walked waddling like a duck), she pressed herself to the lips of her dead lover for a long time. The next day at the morgue, Jeanne ran into Simone Thiroux and suddenly stopped and slapped her twice in the face, quietly saying: “This is for you for my damned children.”

On the day of Modigliani's death, January 24, 1920, friends did not allow the pregnant Jeanne to remain alone and almost forcibly escorted her to her parents. For the Hebuternes, everything that happened was just a terrible, indelible stain of shame. Zhanna was lying on the sofa in her room, turning her face to the wall, and her parents in the living room were loudly arguing about her future fate. Father Hebuterne insisted that his fallen daughter leave his house forever. Jeanne's brother Andre, meanwhile, quietly went up to his sister. “Don’t worry about me, everything will be fine,” she whispered to him. And then she told Andre about the visions that had visited her more than once, that Modi is an angel and a genius who will have eternal happiness in heaven, and here on earth he will be recognized only after death; and that she, Zhanna, was sent into this world only to accompany Modi to where no one will stop them from loving each other...

Suddenly Zhanna closed her eyes and fell silent, as if she had fallen asleep mid-sentence. Soon Andre dozed off, but was immediately awakened by the loud knock of the window frame. Zhanna was not in the room. And below, on the street, a crowd of onlookers was already gathering, gawking at the sprawled, mutilated body of a pregnant woman...
text in part by E. Golovina

As Jeanne predicted, Modigliani’s works became famous and in demand immediately after his death - they began to be bought up
already during his funeral. During his lifetime, unlike Picasso or Chagall, he was completely unknown, but a few years will pass
decades, and at Christie's auction a portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne, once painted by her impoverished lover, will be sold for 42.5 million dollars:

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (Italian, 1884-1920) “Jeanne Hebuterne (Au chapeau)” 1919

The works of Amedeo Modigliani (paintings, sketches, sculptures) were not recognized during the creator’s lifetime, but now they are valued extremely highly. A. Modigliani (1884 - 1920) lived short life, only thirty-five years old. He is Italian by birth, but developed as an artist in Paris Montparnasse. In this article we will look at the works of a prominent representative of expressionism, Modigliani. Paintings with titles and brief descriptions will be presented below.

Artist's style

The painter's portraits are some of the most memorable in his art. They make up 90% of the work of the Italian who became a Parisian. He himself said: “To do any work, I must have a living person. I have to see him opposite me.” Any painting by Modigliani stands out for its archetypal nature from the works of his contemporaries.

Modigliani's portraits rely, no matter how strange it may seem, on traditions and challenge them. He captures the image of a person not for posterity, but at the moment at which this person is in front of the artist. Like the works of Italian Renaissance artists whom the creator admired, his portraits create a certain distance between the viewer and the image. It is here that one must penetrate to reveal the secrets of the artist. This effect is achieved primarily through expressive eyes, which Modigliani often simply painted over with one color.

Consider a self-portrait of the artist, made in warm golden-red tones. Cold blue is present only in the artist’s muffler, and it does not disturb the harmonious coloring. This Modigliani painting hides the eyes. He painted this painting a year before his death, in 1919, and it is located in the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo, Brazil. This work can be called the artist's testament. The very ill Modigliani feared death, but still felt that a personal testimony to his art should be left behind. The artist turns his emaciated face to us with the stamp of death.

Work recognition

A Modigliani painting is immediately recognizable by the artist's hand. He paints women with long necks, flat, elongated faces, huge almond-shaped eyes and small pursed lips. His tones are monochrome, especially in his early portraits. Lacking money to pay a professional model, the artist often repeats the same model. An example would be the “Portrait of Margarita,” painted twice.

All Modigliani's paintings have a certain mystery. The photo above is from 1916 (New York). A young woman (some consider her the artist’s sister) sits on a chair half-turned towards the viewer, turning a serious look at him. Light pink tones stand out in contrast against the background of a dark burgundy door.

"Alice", 1915

A classic painting by Modigliani that shows him in the full flower of his creativity.

The girl is full of calm, seriousness and beauty. The blue dress and gray wall background suggest the artist’s exploration of adjacent tonalities. Long dark hair, tied with a blue bow, lies very harmoniously along the face and neck. This work is in the Copenhagen State Museum. In 1909, Modigliani told his friend: “Happiness is an angel with a serious face.”

Modigliani's Companion

Jeanne Hebuterne appeared in the artist’s life three years before his death. The beautiful girl entered the circle of Montparnasse artists thanks to her brother, who wanted to become an artist. There, in the spring of 1917, Jeanne was introduced to Amedeo. The girl began an affair with a gifted and exceptional artist. This love grew into a serious deep connection. Jeanne moved in with Modigliani, despite the objections of her Catholic parents. The girl was gentle, shy and delicate.

Thin and fragile, graceful and feminine Jeanne is written with great touching love. Modigliani's painting shows her spiritual purity and even the complete absence of makeup. Their poverty did not bother the young woman. From that time on, Zhanna became main theme artist. He painted several portraits of her. There is a work in which the artist depicted a pregnant girl when Jeanne was carrying their first child. Then she became pregnant with her second, but the deeply ill artist died. Zhanna could not bear this. In a fit of madness due to the loss of a 9-month pregnancy, she committed suicide. The unborn child also died, and eldest daughter Amedeo's sister took him in.

The life of two loving hearts ended with such a tragedy.

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani is an Italian artist and sculptor, one of the most famous artists late XIX- early 20th century, a prominent representative of expressionism.

Biography of Amadeo Modigliani

“The human face is the highest creation of nature” - these words of the artist could become an epigraph to his work.

Modigliani Amedeo (1884-1920), Italian painter, sculptor, graphic artist, draftsman; belonged to the "Paris School". Modigliani was born in Livorno on July 12, 1884. He began to study the art of painting in 1898 in the workshop of the sculptor Gabriele Micheli. Since 1902, he studied at the “Free School of Drawing from Nude” at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, mainly with the painter Giovanni Fattori, whose name is in Italian painting The movement of “Macchiaioli”, related to the French “Tachisme”, is associated. In 1903, having moved to Venice, Modigliani studied at the “Free School of Nude” of the Venice Institute fine arts. From 1906 he settled in Paris, where he took lessons at the Colarossi Academy of Painting. In 1907, Modigliani first showed his works at the Autumn Salon, and from 1908 he exhibited at the Salon of Independents. In the Rotunda café on Montparnasse Boulevard, where writers and artists gathered, Modigliani was among friends who, like him, lived with the problems of art. During these years, the artist was keenly searching for his “soul line,” as his friend, the poet Jean Cocteau, called Modigliani’s creative quest. If the first works of the Parisian period were executed in a manner close to the graphics of Toulouse-Lautrec, then already in 1907 the artist discovered the paintings of Cezanne, met Pablo Picasso and for some time was influenced by these masters.

This is evidenced by the works of 1908-1909 (“Jewish Woman”, 1908, “Celloist”, 1909, both in a private collection, Paris).

Especially important role His passion for African sculpture, its rough-simple but expressive forms and clean silhouette lines also played a role in the formation of Modigliani’s individual style.

At the same time, the art of his native Italy and, above all, Botticelli’s drawings, Trecento painting and the masterfully complex graphics of the Mannerists are the master’s sources of inspiration. Modigliani's complex talent was most fully revealed in the portrait genre.

“Man is what interests me. The human face is the highest creation of nature. For me this is an inexhaustible source,” writes Modigliani. Never making portraits to order, the artist painted only people whose fates he knew well; Modigliani seemed to be recreating his own image of the model.

In the sharply expressive portraits of Diego Rivera (1914, Art Museum, Sao Paulo), Pablo Picasso (1915, private collection, Geneva), Max Jacob (1916, private collection, Paris), Jean Cocteau (private collection, New York), Chaim Soutine (1917, National Gallery of Art, Washington) the artist precisely found the details, gesture, silhouette line, color dominants, the key to understanding the entire image - always a subtly captured characteristic “state of mind.”

Works of Amadeo Clemente Modigliani

Among other outstanding French masters beginning of the century Modigliani seems most connected with the classical tradition.

He was not fascinated by the Cubists’ experiments with “pure” space and time; he did not, like the Fauvists, strive to embody the universal laws of life. For Modigliani, man was “a world that is sometimes worth many worlds,” and the human personality in its unique originality is the only source of images. But, unlike portrait painters of previous eras, he did not create a picturesque “mirror” of nature. It is characteristic that, always working from life, he did not so much “copy” its features as compare them with his inner vision. Using a refined stylization of the model’s appearance and abstract rhythms of lines and plastic masses, with the help of their expression, dynamic “shifts” and harmonious unity, Modigliani created his freely poetic, purely spiritual, sadness-covered images.

The most characteristic feature of his style is the special role of line, but in all its best works the artist sought harmony of line and color, a richness of values, united in generalized color zones.

The sculptural integrity of volumes is combined in his paintings with sculpted color, space seems pressed into the plane of the canvas, and the line not only outlines objects, but also connects spatial plans. In the general softness of Modigliani's style, in the light that fills his work, the Italian basis of his art is clearly perceptible.

Modigliani almost never painted bourgeois or wealthy clients.

His characters are ordinary people, maids, peasants, as well as the artists and poets around him. Each of the images is dictated by nature. Women are full of refined grace or folk energy, they look either arrogant or defenseless. In “Self-Portrait” the image embodies a restrained lyrical impulse, seeming to be filled with music from within. Modigliani portrays his friend and almost only “Marchand,” the poet L. Zborovsky, immersed in dreams, the expressionist artist X. Soutine as open and impulsive, and the more classical painter M. Kisling as stubborn and internally compressed. IN plastic solution portrait of Max Jacob, sophistication is inseparable from modern syncopated rhythms... For all their uniqueness, these portraits bear the features of a single handwriting (almond-shaped or lake-like eyes, arrow-shaped noses, pursed lips, a predominance of oval and elongated shapes, etc.) and a single vision. In all of them one can feel compassion and tenderness for people, soft, contemplative and closed lyricism.

Modigliani does not seek to unravel the mystery of the identity of his heroes; on the contrary, each of his images reveals its own special mystery and beauty.

Self-portrait Portrait of the poet Zborovsky Portrait of Chaim Soutine

An equally striking page of his work is the depiction of nudes. Compared to others' nudes modern masters, in particular A. Matisse, Modigliani’s “nudes” always seem individual and portrait-like. The more contrasting is the transformation of a nature full of immediate life into images, purified of everything empirical, filled with enlightened and timeless beauty. In these images, the concrete sensual principle is preserved, but it is “sublimated”, spiritualized, translated into the language of musically fluid lines and harmonies of rich ocher tones - light golden, reddish-red, dark brown.

An almost inexhaustible part of Modigliani’s heritage is drawings (portraits or “nude”), made in pencil, ink, ink, watercolor or pastel.

Drawing was, as it were, the artist’s way of existence; it embodied Modigliani’s inherent love of line, his constant thirst for creativity and his inexhaustible interest in people; pencil sketches he often paid for a cup of coffee or a plate of food. Created at once, without corrections, these drawings impress with their stylistic energy, figurative completeness, and precision of form.

Interesting Facts: Sex Life and Drama

Sex life

Modigliani loved women, and they loved him. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of women have been in the bed of this elegant handsome man.

Back at school, Amedeo noticed that girls paid special attention to him. Modigliani said that at the age of 15 he was seduced by a maid working in their house.

Although he, like many of his colleagues, was not averse to visiting brothels, the bulk of his mistresses were his models.

And during his career he changed hundreds of models. Many posed for him naked, interrupting several times during the session to make love.

Modigliani liked simple women most of all, for example, laundresses, peasant women, and waitresses.

These girls were terribly flattered by attention beautiful artist, and they obediently gave themselves to him.

Sexual partners

Despite his many sexual partners, Modigliani loved only two women in his life.

The first was Beatrice Hastings, an English aristocrat, poetess, five years old older than the artist. They met in 1914 and immediately became inseparable lovers.

They drank together, had fun and often fought. Modigliani, in a rage, could drag her by the hair along the sidewalk if he suspected her of attention to other men.

But despite all these dirty scenes, it was Beatrice who was his main source of inspiration. During the heyday of their love, Modigliani created his best works. Still this whirlwind romance could not exist for long. In 1916, Beatrice ran away from Modigliani. Since then they have not seen each other again.

The artist grieved for his unfaithful girlfriend, but not for long.

In July 1917, Modigliani met 19-year-old Jeanne Hebuterne.

The young student came from French family Catholics. The delicate, pale girl and the artist settled together, despite the resistance of Jeanne’s parents, who did not want a Jewish son-in-law. Jeanne not only served as a model for the artist’s works, she went through with him years of serious illness, periods of rudeness and outright rowdyism.

In November 1918, Jeanne gave birth to Modigliani’s daughter, and in July 1919, he proposed marriage to her “as soon as all the papers arrive.”

Why they never got married remains a mystery, since these two were, as they say, made for each other and remained together until his death 6 months later.

When Modigliani lay dying in Paris, he invited Jeanne to join him in death, “so that I could be with my beloved model in paradise and enjoy eternal bliss with her.”

On the day of the artist’s funeral, Zhanna was on the verge of despair, but did not cry, but was only silent the whole time.

Pregnant with their second child, she threw herself from the fifth floor to her death.

A year later, at the insistence of the Modigliani family, they were united under one gravestone. The second inscription on it read:

Jeanne Hebuterne. Born in Paris in April 1898. Died in Paris on January 25, 1920. Faithful companion of Amedeo Modigliani, who did not want to survive separation from him.

Modigliani and Anna Akhmatova

A. A. Akhmatova met Amedeo Modigliani in 1910 in Paris, during her honeymoon.

Her acquaintance with A. Modigliani continued in 1911, at which time the artist created 16 drawings - portraits of A. A. Akhmatova. In her essay on Amedeo Modigliani she wrote:

In 10, I saw him extremely rarely, only a few times. Nevertheless, he wrote to me all winter. (I remember several phrases from his letters, one of them: Vous etes en moi comme une hantise / You are like an obsession in me). He didn’t tell me that he wrote poetry.

As I now understand, what struck him most about me was my ability to guess thoughts, see other people’s dreams and other little things that those who know me have long been accustomed to.

At this time, Modigliani was raving about Egypt. He took me to the Louvre to see the Egyptian section and assured me that everything else was unworthy of attention. Drew my head in decoration Egyptian queens and dancers and seemed completely captivated by the great art of Egypt. Apparently Egypt was his latest hobby. Soon he becomes so original that you don’t want to remember anything when looking at his canvases.

He didn’t draw me from life, but at his home—he gave these drawings to me. There were sixteen of them. He asked me to frame them and hang them in my room. They died in a Tsarskoye Selo house in the first years of the revolution. Only one survived, and, unfortunately, there is less foreshadowing of his future in him than in the others.”

Bibliography and filmography

Literature

• Parisot K. “Modigliani”, M., Text, 2008.
• Vilenkin V.V. “Amedeo Modigliani”, M. 1970.

Filmography

• In 1957, the Frenchman Jacques Becker directed the film "Montparnasse 19" ("The Lovers of Montparnasse") with Gérard Philippe in the title role.
• In 2004, Briton Mick Davis directed the film Modigliani, starring Andy Garcia.

When writing this article, materials from the following sites were used:bibliotekar.ru ,

If you find any inaccuracies or would like to add to this article, please send us information to email address admin@site, we and our readers will be very grateful to you.

Biography and episodes of life Amedeo Modigliani. When born and died Amedeo Modigliani, memorable places and dates of important events in his life. Artist Quotes, Photo and video.

Years of life of Amedeo Modigliani:

born July 12, 1884, died January 24, 1920

Epitaph

Left a mark in people's hearts,
The memory of you is forever alive.

Biography

Biography of Amedeo Modigliani - life story genius artist, recognized only after death. Modigliani's life was filled with many hardships - poverty, misunderstanding of his contemporaries, drugs, failed relationships and serious illnesses. Today, Modigliani's paintings are sold for fabulous sums - Amedeo is considered one of the most famous artists XIX-XX centuries

Perhaps, if not for a difficult childhood, Modigliani would never have become an artist. The boy grew up in poor family Italian Jews and was sick a lot - first with pleurisy, then with typhus. During his fever, Amedeo raved about paintings by Italian artists, and when he recovered, his parents allowed him to leave school and take up painting to help the young man realize his dreams. By the age of eighteen, Modigliani’s mother was able to save some money so that he could continue his studies and work in Paris, where Amedeo moved.

In Paris, Modigliani was constantly short of money. And not only because his paintings hardly sold, but also because, finding himself in bohemian French society, young Modigliani soon became interested in alcohol and drugs. He survived mainly thanks to his patrons, who saw young man great talent. But Modigliani’s only lifetime exhibition was closed within a few hours; the police from the station opposite were outraged by the images of nude models in Modigliani’s paintings.

It was stormy personal life Modigliani - it was rumored that he had love relationship with all the women who posed for him. He himself explained this by necessity, saying how you can draw a woman and show her beauty and sensuality without ever knowing her. Among famous novels Modigliani - love affair with Anna Akhmatova. Modigliani's last and most important model was the artist Jeanne Hebuterne. In fact, they were spouses. Jeanne gave birth to Modigliani's only daughter - she was named after her mother.

Hebuterne was pregnant with her second child when her husband died suddenly. Modigliani's death occurred when he was only 35 years old. Modigliani's cause of death was tuberculous meningitis. The day after Amedeo Modigliani's death, his wife committed suicide by jumping out of a window. At the time of her death, she was nine months pregnant. Modigliani's funeral took place in Paris; Modigliani's grave is located in the Père Lachaise cemetery. The remains of his wife, reburied ten years after her death, rest in the adjacent grave.

Life line

July 12, 1884 Date of birth of Amedeo Modigliani.
1898 Visit Modigliani private art studio Guglielmo Micheli.
1902 Admission to the Free School of Nude Painting from the Academy of Arts in Florence.
1903 Admission to the Venice Institute of Fine Arts.
1906 Moving to Paris.
1910 Meeting Akhmatova.
December 3, 1917 Opening of Modigliani's only lifetime exhibition.
April 1917 Meet Jeanne Hebuterne.
November 29, 1918 Birth of Modigliani's daughter, Jeanne.
January 24, 1920 Modigliani's date of death.

Memorable places

1. Livorno, where Amedeo Modigliani was born.
2. Modigliani House in Italy.
3. Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where Modigliani studied.
4. Cafe "Rotunda", where Parisian artists often gathered and where Modigliani met Akhmatova.
5. Modigliani's house (workshop) in Paris, where he lived and worked in 1916.
6. Modigliani's house in Paris, where he lived last years to death.
7. The building of the former Charité hospital, where Modigliani died.
8. Père Lachaise cemetery, where Modigliani is buried.

Episodes of life

In Paris, Modigliani was in poverty, like many other artists. Addicted to alcohol, he sometimes tried to pay for drinks with his drawings or sketches, which no one bought. For example, the owner of a brasserie in Montparnasse, who had a liking for a pale, dark-haired young man in a felt hat, agreed to such a barter. True, Rosalie was an illiterate woman and used the drawings she received from Modigliani to light the fireplace, so only a few works have survived. On them Amedeo left the signature “Modi” - translated from French as “damned”.

The period of relations with Anna Akhmatova was very fruitful for the artist. In total, Modigliani wrote about 150 works in which one can detect a portrait resemblance to the Russian poetess. Akhmatova herself preserved only one drawing by Modigliani. When the poet Anatoly Naiman asked Anna Andreevna if she had a will, she replied: “What kind of inheritance can we talk about? Take Modi’s drawing under your arm and leave.”

During the last years of Modigliani's life, his paintings finally began to sell. Amedeo and Zhanna had money, she became pregnant with her second child, and it seemed that things were going uphill. Alas, but sudden illness The artist's life was cut short, followed by his beloved - of her own free will. After the death of both parents, Modigliani's daughter was taken in by Amedeo's sister.

Covenant

"Happiness is an angel with a sad face."

TV story about Modigliani's life

Condolences

“Everything divine in Modigliani only sparkled through some kind of darkness. He was completely unlike anyone else in the world.”
Anna Akhmatova, poetess

“Our Modigliani, or Modi, as he is called, was a typical and at the same time very talented representative of bohemian Montmartre; rather, he was the last true representative of bohemia.”
Ludwig Meidner, artist

Amedeo Modigliani ( Amedeo Modigliani) - great Italian artist. Born in Livorno in 1884 - died in Milan in 1920. Belonged to the Paris School of Painting and.

He received his first painting lessons at the school of Gabriele Michele, who was a student of Giovanni Fattori. Then he attended the drawing school at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence, where Fattori himself taught. His first works - Road to Salviano, Seated Boys, etc. - attracted art connoisseurs to his work. Even then it was clear that the art of this artist was unique and unlike anything else.

In 1906 Modigliani moved to Paris. Despite the fact that he did not want to live in France, fine art developed here like nowhere else. In addition, if I may say so, all the bohemians from painting gathered in Paris. Where, if not here, could a young and successful artist live!? In Paris, he was constantly in creative search. Here he became acquainted with the works of Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso, who greatly influenced his worldview and approach to painting. This is very clearly visible from the works of that time: Jewish Woman, Cellist. He was also greatly influenced by his passion for African sculpture, which simultaneously combines simplicity, minimalism, cubism and grace, beauty, and deep meaning.

Amedeo Modigliani's talent was especially fully revealed in the portrait genre. He believed that man is the highest creation of nature and the human face is the most beautiful thing in the world. Surprisingly, he never made portraits to order, but only obeyed own desires. He painted portraits only of those people whom he knew well and whom he wanted to paint. Among those who were honored to be captured by the master’s hand were: Diego Rivera, Chaim Soutine, Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau and others.

Girl in blue

Yellow sweater

Woman with black ribbon

Cypress trees and houses

Red bust

Reclining nude

Young red-haired woman

Portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne

Portrait of Margarita

Portrait of Paul Alexandre on a green background

Mediterranean landscape

Standing Caryatid