Amedeo Modigliani was born in Livorno on July 12, 1884 into a Jewish family. He began studying painting at 14 with Guglielmo Micheli, but already at that age he was suffering from tuberculosis which prevented him from being normal and with all the hopes of a young man towards a future life. In the early months of 1900 he was sent to southern Italy to recover, until his state of health improved, he decided to go and stay for short periods in Rome and then in Florence and Venice.
Probably his stays in these cities allowed him to see many masterpieces of Italian art of all times and it was probably this artistic experience that gave him that taste for drawing which he kept until the end.
In 1906 Modigliani arrived in Paris, where different trends were taking place which could not fail to influence the young man in his early twenties.
Here he met the art of Toulouse Lautrec, who preferred the nervous sign and the scarce synthesis of the art caricature; but he also felt the tradition of Impressionism and the specific influence for it Cezanne and for Constantin brancusi and the African sculptures that were beginning to appear in the Parisian art world.
Hence the union between Brancusi's sculpture and aboriginal masks, a synthesis present in many portraits by Modigliani. The influx for African art did not only influence Modigliani, but also Pablo Picasso, Maurice Vlaminck and Georgia Rouault.
In 1909 Modigliani began to lead a life that contributed to making him a legendary figure in the districts of Paris, first in Montmartre and then in Montparnasse, but tubercosis did not stop and consumed him slowly.
Conscious of an ever shorter life, he drank heavily and experimented with a variety of drugs, including hashic. Almost always broke, he slept where he could, with friends or on the street, while working during the day in the cafes of the city.
Poverty and the need to get a hot dish forced him to sell what he produced for negligible sums or to barter the works for something to eat. Despite this he was proud and never accepted charity, rather he placed a work of him like a bill to pay for the meal or drink.
He remembers that one day while sitting in a café, he saw a girl and drew her, then gallantly offered her the drawing. But as soon as the young woman asked him to sign it, he got annoyed and scrawled her name in huge letters and handed it back to her.
Vlaminck, in his memoirs, narrates another episode to show how far Modigliani's pride went when he realized that they wanted to take advantage of his poverty. One day a merchant took a group of drawings from the artist at a very low price, but not satisfied, the merchant asked him for a further discount, so Modigliani took the drawings and made a single hole in the bundle, inserted a string, in the back room and went to hang them in the outhouse.
His first acknowledgments came when he exhibited at the Salon del Indèpendants in 1910 and then in 1912. One of the most important events in his life was the meeting in 1916 with the art dealer and poet, the Polish Leopold Zborowki, who became the faithful companion of his Parisian raids. It was Zboroski himself who helped him sell the works at fair prices and in 1917 arranged his first solo exhibition at the Berthe Weill Gallery.
He loved to portray his women with a sincerity and freshness that were judged immoral by the authorities, who closed the exhibition at the Weill gallery. So for some time the doors to museums were closed to him. Yet the contemplation of those unveiled forms was pure, long-limbed bodies capable only of creating rhythms and lines of subtle harmony.
"Modi”, as friends called him, he also had an unbridled passion for women; of his many adventures, he left us the portraits of almost all of his lovers, Beatrice Hastings, Jean and Hebuterne and many others with names still unknown.
It was the painter Moïse Kisling who brought the news to Paris that Modigliani had died after only two days in the hospital, it was 1920 and Modì had not yet turned 36.
Modigliani was a decadent with the temperament of a poet who expressed himself not in verse but in signs and brushstrokes. His aristocratic bearing was celebrated in his regular features and at the same time mingled with his satanic pride and his passion for women was celebrated even more when, while he painted them, he recited sentences from Dante's Divine Comedy.
