Amedeo Modigliani

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Italian artist who specialized in portrait paintings of artists, poets, musicians and models, using a style that depicted them with long bodies and oval heads. He supported himself sketching café portraits after he moved to Paris, and establishing a reputation as a mendicant, a peddler in the streets of his wares. He also did sculpture. He died young on 1/24/1920 in Nice, France. Born in Livorno, Italy to a middle-class, educated and cultivated family of Sephardic Italian Jews, he had three older siblings. His grandfather, Isaac, was a cultivated man who spoke four languages and would become young Modigliani’s mentor. He did not start formal schooling until age ten, and then it was to go to a school his mother had opened for young girls. A moody youngster, he entered a local art academy in his early teens. In 1900, at age 16, he suffered an illness that was thought to have been tuberculosis. After a long convalescence, he and his mother went to Naples, Capri, Rome, Florence and other locations, and after that, his hometown had no appeal for him. He left for Florence to study, then went to class in Venice. Later he moved to Paris. In 1907, after a year of living in Paris, he had a showing of seven of his works at the Salon d’Automne. Around the same time, he met Paul Alexandre, who presided over a type of commune for artists in a house he had rented. In 1917, he had his first and only one-man show at the Berthe Weil Gallery, which was closed by police on opening night because of complaints about nude art. In 1910, he had a brief affair with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. In the spring of 1917, he had an affair with Jeanne Hebuterne, an art student. By 1918, Modigliani’s health was deteriorating. He and Jeanne went to Nice where their daughter Jeanne was born. On 1/22/1920, Modigliani was admitted to the hospital in a coma. He died of tubercular meningitis on 1/24/1920 without regaining consciousness. On the same morning, Jeanne Hebuterne came to view the body. Though in her eighth month of a second pregnancy, she committed suicide the next morning. Link to Wikipedia biography