Amedeo Modigliani was born in Livorno in 1884 and at the age of 14 he began to study painting with Guglielmo Micheli.
In the early 900s he moved to the south to recover from the tuberculosis that had struck him and once recovered, he began to travel, first to Rome, then to Florence and Venice. Everywhere he tried to discover his masters of painting from the previous centuries, to the point that he was so influenced by them that he only found in himself the desire to continue painting. In 1906 Modigliani went to Paris, where he became acquainted with the art of Toulouse-Lautrec, of which he loved the nervous sign and the synthesis of the art caricature.
At first enthralled by Impressionism, especially by Cezanne and then by Brancusi and the African sculptures which were beginning to appear in the artistic world of Paris. In 1909 he began to lead a bohemian life with a poet's temperament capable of expressing himself in verse, in poetry as in brushstrokes. He was a "decadent" with a frenzy to live his life intensely and passionately. He loved Dante's poetry, and there was no time for him to recite a few verses of the Divine Comedy. He thus became a legendary figure especially in the Montparnasse and Montmartre districts.
He didn't care in the least about his disease which was progressing, he lived a conscious victim of his disease. He drank heavily and smoked, including hashish. All the money he recovered from the sale of a painting was used only for his vices, so he was almost always broke and slept wherever he could, even on the street. Her day was spent in the cafés where she worked and to eat she often sold her works at ridiculously low prices. Sometimes for a whiskey she'd give up her last work, still fresh in color. One day, it is said of her that she made a sketch for an American tourist and gallantly offered it to her, she asked her to sign it and he resented her and scrawled her name on it covering her entire drawing.
What irritated him the most was when he had the impression that people wanted to take advantage of his poverty. Once he offered a folder of drawings to a merchant at a ridiculous price, and the merchant - perhaps for fun - offered him half. Modigliani took the folder with the six drawings and gave them a gift, but first he had pierced them and tied them with string, advising them to hang them in the toilet. his first recognitions came in 1910 and 1912 when he exhibited at the Hall of the Independents. One of the most important events in his life was the meeting with a Polish art dealer Leopold Zborowski, who also became a poet-friend of the artist's Parisian raids. But he also helped him to defend himself from himself and from his decidedly unruly life, trying to act as a merchant even for his works, which began to be purchased at fairer prices. In 1917 together they set up the first exhibition at the Berthe Weila Gallery.
But "Modi” because that's what they called him, he loved women too much who, even if they cost him, made him happy, to the point that he portrayed them as muses. From his adventures he has left us some splendid portraits, such as that of Beatrice Hastings or Jeanne Hebuterne, with whom he also had a daughter. He portrayed them with sincerity and freshness that were judged immoral by the authorities to even shut down an exhibition of hers. His ability to paint nudes transferred - they said - a strong and equivocal emotion. Sure that the contemplation of those unveiled forms induced sensations less pure than hers in the public, for some time her paintings found the doors of museums closed. In January 1920 "Modì" who was not yet 36 years old left Montparnasse forever.
In 1922, after his death, an exhibition was ordered at the XII Venice Biennial and a critic said "twelve ugly shapeless heads that could have been drawn by a five-year-old"
His friend Jacques Lipchitz he wrote "Modigliani told me more than once: I want a short and intense life", And so it was.
Today his works are capable of giving rise to scandals such as sudden forgeries put on the market and unpublished works found by chance, it almost seems that it is a page from his diary, all done to surprise, such as the awarding of the work "Nu Couché” sold at auction last fall at Christie's for the tidy sum of 170,4 million dollars.
