Fourth child to a middle-class Jewish family established in the Italian port of Livorno, Amedeo Modigliani was born on 12 July 1884. A lot of his early life is known to us thanks to the diary that his French-born mother Eugenie Modigliani nee Garsin kept during those years. At an early age, Amedeo, encouraged by his mother, began taking drawing lessons in Livorno, Florence, Rome and then Venice.
In 1906, Amedeo Modigliani left for Paris where, after some time in Montmartre, he settled in Montparnasse where he took up residence at La Ruche. A year later, in 1907, he was to meet his first buyer, Dr Paul Alexandre who admired his work and advised the young Italian artist to show his work at the Salon des Independants. The following year Modigliani was to exhibit six paintings at the 1908 Salon des Independants. His early work showed the influence of Toulouse Lautrec and Cezanne.

In 1909, at Modigliani 's request, Dr Alexandre introduced him to sculptor Brancusi who was to encourage him to sculpt. In 1910, Modigliani took up sculpture in the form of stone carving ; his new influences : Cubism heralded by his two friends Picasso and Braque, and African art. The result was a series of Heads carved in monumental style which he produced alongside portraits. The sketches above date from a period stretching from 1910 to the onset of the Great War in 1914. At the time Modigliani was toying with the idea of sculpting Caryatids, crouching female figures supporting a heavy weight which he drew with great sensuality. These sculptures however never saw the light as the First World War broke out. Materials became very expensive and Modigliani could hardly afford them. Because of his poor health (condition aggravated by the abuse of alcohol and other drugs), he was declared unfit and discharged from the army. Dr Alexandre was called up and disappeared at war.

In 1914, Modigliani met English novelist Beatrice Hastings with whom he had a stormy relationship for the next two years. He was also introduced to art dealer Paul Guillaume who was to buy pictures from him until 1916. Modigliani's output switched from sculpture to drawing and painting. But the Italian painter remained poor despite the potential money-making quality that some saw in his work. Modigliani had no commercial sense and showed no interest in financial success. He kept painting portraits of his friends, painters, poets and intellectuals (Picasso, Rivera, Soutine, Max Jacob, etc...), and people who commissioned him, charging a derisory amount of money for his work : a few francs and a little alcohol per sitting. Portraits were executed with originality, each revealing the psychological makeup of the sitter.

In 1916, Modigliani started work on his series of nudes. Altogether, he painted over thirty of these nudes, a tenth of his total output of oil paintings. Interestingly, he never used the women with whom he had a lasting relationship like Beatrice Hastings or Jeanne Hebuterne to model for him when he painted nudes. Instead Modigliani prefered using housemaids or waitresses, although he also used professional models when art dealers paid their fee which, most often, he could not afford. It is argued that he may have had brief love affairs with his models as the sexually charged atmosphere of some of his paintings seem to imply. His models can be divided into two types.

The largest group is composed of dark-haired women, with full breasts and wide hips, Mediterranean of appearance, whom scholars identify as the Venus naturalis male ideal of love. The other type of models comprise high-breasted women depicted by Modigliani as childlike and demure, and likened to the other male ideal of love, the Venus coelestis. The natural, hearthly Venus opposed to the celestial Venus.

As a rule, paintings were preceded by preliminary studies on paper, an example of which can be seen at the bottom of this page. A characteristic of these paintings is the starkness of the settings ; the bed or sofa on which the model is reclining, or the background against which the model is posing are often sketchily suggested. As a rule the colours are warm, the nude is painted in a naturalistic style. The sensuous contours of the model's body are clearly defined by curvy lines or arabesques which guide the eyes of the viewer around the hieratic form. No distraction is allowed ; the body often truncated occupies most of the canvas space. Some of Modigliani' s nudes clearly depict woman as a sex object on display ; some reclining nudes in particular show women stretching out provocatively offering themselves to the viewer. The "scandalous" nature of some of these works were to attract the outrage of the establishment as we will see below.

Some time during 1916, Modigliani switched to the art dealer Leopold Zborowski with whom he was to remain very close. April 1917, saw Amadeo Modigliani fall in love with an art student from the Colarossi School, Jeanne Hebuterne with whom he was to live until his death. During that period portraits still alternated with nudes in the painter's ouput. In December 1917, an exhibition of paintings by Modigliani - his only one-man show - held in Paris at the Berthe Weill galerie was raided by the police who, acting on complaints, confiscated several nude paintings and drawings because "they were offensive to modesty". March 1918, suffering from tuberculosis, Modigliani left for the South of France where he was to spend several months ; during this exile from Paris, he continued painting, his output including some rare landscapes. In November 1919, a daughter was born from his union with Jeanne Hebuterne.

May 1919, the couple moved back to Paris with their baby daughter. By now, some of Modigliani's work started to appear in various exhibitions. However, the painter's health continued to deteriorate aggravated by alcoholism. January 1920, Modigliani died in hospital at the age of 35 from tubercular meningitis. The following day, Jeanne Hebuterne, who was eight months pregnant, committed suicide.

PS: I would like to add to my collection of nudes by Modigliani. if you happen to have cards that I am missing, I'd be delighted to set up a trade...

Bibliography :
Amedeo Modigliani - Portraits and nudes by Anette Kruszynski
   Copyright : 1996, Prestel-Verlag, Munich
Modigliani by Carol Mann
   Copyright : 1980,1995, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London
Modigliani by Christian Parisot
   Copyright : 1992, Editions Pierre Terrail, Paris