Works by Amedeo Modigliani
138 works · 141 ms
Amedeo Modigliani stretched the faces, necks and figures of the people he painted; in Woman with Red Hair the almond-shaped eyes are filled in solid black.
He trained in his home town of Livorno under Guglielmo Micheli, a pupil of Giovanni Fattori, and settled in Paris in 1906. From 1909 to 1914 he worked mainly as a sculptor, spending a year as the disciple of Constantin Brâncuși, until the war made materials scarce and his health failed. Female Bust in Red, a gouache of 1915, is still a carver's picture: head and breasts are hard red blocks, and each stroke lands like a chisel blow.
Most works below are portraits, more often of women than men, with a few drawings. Alice carries the girl's name in capitals at the top left; she sits in a pale blue dress, fitted into a tall, narrow canvas. The artist Jacques Lipchitz ordered Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz in 1916, when he married, to help his hard-up friend. By Lipchitz's account, Modigliani finished it in two days, and Lipchitz talked him into two more weeks of work so he could pay him more.
From 1916 his dealer Léopold Zborowski paid him by the day to paint nudes, lending him a flat and finding the models. Nudes hung in his one solo show, in Paris in 1917; police closed it on opening day, though it went on after. In Nude on a Blue Cushion of 1917 the body is one warm, smooth shape held by a thin dark line, laid against a roughly brushed red-brown ground.
Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago.
