Amedeo Modigliani - a Jewish French Artist
Amedeo Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor. He is among the most important of the 20th century. His life is one of the greatest tragedies in art. He was born on July 12, 1884 to a Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno (Leghorn), Italy. He was raised in a Jewish ghetto. His father was a businessman and his brother, Vittorio Emanuele Modigliani, was in active Socialist leader. He became ill in January 1920 and died ten days later of tubercular meningitis. He died a pauper on January 24, 1920 at 35. His family was poor but they had prosperous relatives so that the boy lacked nothing. He attended gymnasium, showed signs of tuberculosis at 17 and spent the winter on the Isle of Capri. After suffering from pleurisy and typhus in 1895 and 1898, he was forced to give up a conventional education, and it was then that he began to study painting. After a brief stay in Florence in 1902, he continued his artistic studies in Venice, remaining there until the winter of 1906, when he left for Paris well equipped with money from his uncle. He attended art classes at the Colarossi school in Paris. In 1908, he exhibited five or six paintings at the Salon des Independants. He also met the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi
Despite his many love affairs, excess of drunkenness, frequent lapses into illness, and poverty, he managed to produce with his relatively short career, a substantial body of work. More than 20 of his sculptures, some 500 paintings, and thousands of watercolors and drawings have survived. Modigliani's Reclining Nude and Nude on a Divan paintings are fine examples of his figure paintings. There is an elegant arrangement of curved lines and planes as well as an outstanding conception of feminine sexuality in both. While there is very little to identify Jewish artists working in Paris in the first decades of the 20th century in terms of their artworks, they were still known as Jews, and there were many close relationships among them. On the occasion of Jacques Lipchitz's marriage to Berthe, Jacques commissioned Modigliani to paint a wedding portrait. It is called "Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz." He is best known for his portraits of women and elegant nudes with their characteristic elongated necks, almond-shaped eyes, calm facial expressions, restrained color and energetic grace. He used many different techniques. One of which is distortion which is the act of deceiving the eye by twisting something out of its original condition or shape. He used this for its emotional effect and produced paintings with balance, composition and sup
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