Amedeo Modigliani - rebel and genius. His paintings shocked Paris a hundred years ago, today they sell for millions

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"What I seek is neither real nor unreal, but rather the unconscious, the mystery of the instinctive in the human race."

When he was alive, he traded his drawings for a plate of food and a glass of wine; today his paintings are worth millions. In 2018, the painting Reclining nude (on the left side) sold at auction for $157.2 million; three years earlier, another collector had auctioned off his Reclining act for as much as $170.4 million. In total, Modigliani left behind around 350 paintings and 25 sculptures, in addition to numerous drawings. Their high prices led to the creation of many forgeries.

Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was born on 12 July 1884 in Livorno, Tuscany, the youngest of the four children of Flaminio and Eugenia Modigliani. Both parents came from wealthy Sephardic Jewish families. His father's ancestors were based in Rome in the early 19th century and provided financial services to the Vatican. The father was a mining engineer, and together with his brothers Alberto and Isaac, managed a large estate and mine in Sardinia and operated a branch in Livorno. By the time Amedeo was born, however, he was in serious financial trouble, and the fall in metal prices led to the company's bankruptcy.

The arrival of Amedeo into the world has made a mark in the family history. While his mother was giving birth, the bailiff arrived to seize the family property, but ancient law dictated that he must not touch the bed of the woman giving birth. So the family packed her bed with their most prized possession, and saved it.

Amedeo's mother, Eugenie, née Garsin, was 15 years younger than Flaminio, and the family married her off to him at the age of 17 because of her wealth. She was born in Marseilles and among her ancestors were a number of scholars who mastered sacred Jewish texts and founded a school of Talmudic studies. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza is said to have been part of the family line.

The marriage was not a very happy one. After the company collapsed, the father left the family and moved to Sardinia to resume the business. The mother stayed in Livorno and lived with her children, two sisters and her widowed father Isaac Garsin, a well-known intellectual who introduced his grandson to philosophical literature. To provide the family with an income, she gave French lessons, translated books, and founded a successful private school with her sister Laura.

Amedeo learned to read and write at an early age. His mother, to whom he was very close, taught him at home until he was ten years old because he was often sick as a child. He was on the verge of death several times, overcoming pleurisy at eleven, then typhoid fever, and finally tuberculosis at sixteen. Already at the age of thirteen, when he was on holiday with his father, he painted several portraits.

When he recovered from his second attack of pleurisy, his mother took him on a trip around Italy - they visited Florence, Rome, Naples and Capri. In Florence, Amedeo became enthusiastic about the old masters and his mother allowed him to leave the lyceum and in 1898 enrolled him at the Academy of Fine Arts in the painting workshop of Guglielmo Micheli, the most famous painter in Livorno at the time. This completed a split with her husband and the Modigliani family, who did not approve of Amedeo's painting or support her eldest son Guiseppo, called Mené, who studied law in Pisa, became a socialist activist and ended up in prison in 1909. Both brothers' studies were financed by Amedeo Garsin, Eugenie's brother.

After two years, Amedeo had to interrupt his studies with Micheli because he fell ill again with tuberculosis. After adopting the 19th century style of painting, as well as that of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, he traveled south for a year to improve his health and artistic style. He began to paint his first nudes, which later made him famous. Even at that time, he preferred to paint around cafes and restaurants, which was not exactly good for his health.

From 1902 he studied painting in Florence at the Academy of Fine Arts, but again had to interrupt his studies for health reasons. In 1903 he moved to Venice for three years, where he enrolled at another school, the Institute of Fine Arts. He began smoking hashish and frequenting cheap bars and brothels. In Venice he met the Chilean painter Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, who remained one of his best friends until the end of his life. He convinced him that the new modern art could only be found in Paris.

In 1906 Modigliani, who had spoken French since childhood, moved to Paris. From the Italian museums, he brought his respect for tradition, but adopted his own distinctive style of painting influenced by primitive art. It was also in Paris that he produced his most important works and where he spent the rest of his short life.

He lived in Montmartre, where he rented a studio where Picasso, Jacob, Salmon and many other celebrities met. Artistically, however, he stood apart from this group and his work remained independent, seeking his own path. He attracted attention with his attractive appearance and demeanour. He dressed in a worn corduroy suit with a red neck scarf and high laced boots. He had an extensive literary and philosophical knowledge, acquired in the cultivated environment of his family, read Nietzsche, and liked to recite passages from Dante's Divine Comedy by heart.

At first he lived on the money his mother sent him and on the inheritance from his uncle Amedeo, but he soon spent it. There was little interest in his art, and the paintings exhibited at the avant-garde Autumn Salon in 1907 received little attention. At that time, he joined a community of artists founded by the physician and art lover Paul Alexandre and his brother, the pharmacist Jean, who introduced him to the sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Amedeo became passionate about sculpture.

In April 1909 he moved to the vicinity of Brancusi's studio in Montparnasse and, after intensive training as a draughtsman, devoted himself to sculpture for several years. At Brancusi's suggestion, he began to work directly with stone, without having previously created a model in clay or plaster, although working with stone was harmful to his weak lungs. All but two of his sculptures are executed in sandstone, and almost all of them take the form of heads. He was inspired not only by black art from West Africa, but also by the art of ancient Greece, Egypt and Khmer art in Cambodia.

He returned to painting in 1913, when he created a series of Karyatids, a series of pastels and watercolours. After 1914 he worked mainly in oil painting. Paul Alexandre was his first great admirer and also a friend who helped him, arranging models and commissions, and remained, to the best of his ability, the main buyer of his paintings until the beginning of the war, when he was mobilized. Modigliani painted three portraits of him in 1909. When mobilization was announced in August 1914, he also wanted to enlist, but was exempted from military service for health reasons and the two friends never met again.

Paul Alexandre

Without his patron, Amedeo lived in poverty and moved frequently for rent. He became a notorious bohemian, addicted to alcohol and hashish. Although hashish was widespread in artistic circles at the time, it was expensive and Amedeo used it more than others, though never at work. He also smoked opium, often in the company of Apollinaire or Picasso. But his main addiction was red wine, and his drinking companion was the painter Maurice Utrillo.

In his drunken stupor, he destroyed almost all of his old paintings, claiming that they were "childish scribbles from when he was a bloody bourgeois". He usually gave his drawings to prostitutes or sold them for a few francs, or traded them directly for a plate of food and a glass of alcohol. He was known in his wider circle as Modì, which was an abbreviation of his surname but also a pun (the French word "maudit" means "cursed"). To his family and friends, he was Dedo. He refused to accept money from his mother and lived from day to day.

Despite his unbounded self-destructive lifestyle and chronically failing health, he always studied and worked honestly and zealously. He regularly visited museums, exhibitions and the studios of fellow artists and read widely. He did not talk about his tuberculosis and when he suffered a relapse in 1909, he went to Livorno to be treated by his mother, where he spent several months.

In 1910 he exhibited six canvases at the Salon des Independents, among which he attracted the attention of Cellist a The Beggar of Livorno. At the tenth Autumn Salon in 1912 he exhibited eight sculptural works in stone under the common title Heads.

Due to his deteriorating health, he had to give up sculpture and concentrated on painting, where he sought his own expression, independent of others. His models have typical graceful shapes and elongated necks, with restrained faces often without painted eyes. The painter is said to have only finished the eyes of those he knew well. "I paint the eyes only when I know the soul." he claimed. Perhaps this predilection for unfinished portraits is related to sculpture, where it was common to leave the eyes blind, without realistic detail.

The most frequent subject of his paintings were women. He attracted their attention and experienced wild relationships with them. In 1910, he met the twenty-one-year-old Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who stayed in the house where he lived. A tender relationship developed between them, although Akhmatova was married. After a year, however, she returned to her husband and went to Russia. The young Italian then began a tempestuous love affair with the South African writer Beatrice Hastings. They lived together from 1913 to 1916. She was his model, but he beat her in a drunken stupor and even threw her out of a window. In 1914 he met the British painter Nina Hamnett. She was promiscuous, bisexual and addicted to alcohol. Legend has it that she was the mistress of all the Montparnasse celebrities and was nicknamed the Queen of the Bohemians.

In 1916, Modigliani became friends with the Polish poet and gallerist Léopold Zborowski, his wife Anna and family friend Lunja Czechowska. Zborowski became his main art dealer and friend in the last years of his life, helping him financially.

Léopold Zborowski

At his suggestion, Modigliani painted a series of 22 nudes between 1916 and 1919, which became one of the most famous works of his career. Zborowski also organized his first solo exhibition at the Berthe Weill Gallery in Paris in December 1917. The exhibited nudes caused a scandal at the opening and were confiscated by the police due to public outrage, but it brought the painter popularity. He also created a series of portraits of fellow artists, including Pablo Picasso.

In July 1917, Modigliani met Jeanne Hébutern, a nineteen-year-old art student. Her Catholic family practically ostracized her because of this; they were particularly bothered by the fact that she was Jewish. Their relationship was also full of excesses and quarrels, but they loved each other deeply. Modigliani's ill health prompted Zborowski to send him and the pregnant Jeanne to the Cote d'Azur in March 1918. In Nice, their daughter Jeanne was born in November 1918, and Modigliani acknowledged her as his own. While there, he painted, among other things, his only four known landscapes. He also painted 25 portraits of Jeanne, but he never painted her naked.

In May 1919, they returned to Paris and Modigliani rented the studio where Gauguin had previously lived. Jeanne became pregnant for the second time and he made a binding declaration in front of witnesses that he would marry her. But his health betrayed him again. Fourteen days after the stormy celebrations of the New Year of 1920, he fell asleep with a high fever and a violent headache. When a neighbour, the painter Ortiz de Zaratei, came to find out why he had not left his apartment a few days later, he found him in a state of severe delirium. Kneeling beside the bed was Jeanne, who was almost eight months pregnant. Although he immediately called a doctor, it was too late. Modigliani died in hospital on 24 January 1920, aged just 35. Doctors ruled the cause of death as tuberculous meningitis, fueled by poverty, overwork, a drug habit, and alcoholism.

The day after his funeral, Jeanne, despite being pregnant, committed suicide by jumping from the fifth floor of her parents' house. At the family's request, she was buried in the local cemetery until 1930 when her remains were moved to Père Lachaise cemetery, alongside Amedeo. Their 15-month-old daughter Jeanne was adopted by Modigliani's sister Margherita, who lived in Florence.

Amedeo and Jeanne's relationship was the subject of a 1958 film The Lovers of Montparnasse, where the painter was played by Gérard Philipe and Jeanne Anouk Aimée. In 2004, the biopic Modiglianiwhich focuses on the painter's rivalry with Picasso.

Gnews.cz / Wikipedia - Jana Černá