His name stood for scandal.
Amedeo Modigliani
was a wild aesthete
after the manner of his time. He loved Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde
and Gabnele D'Annunzio, smoked hashish, drank absinthe, danced naked on
the tables of third-rate cafes, fought with the police and spent many an
odd night locked up. He is supposed to have been intimate with many
waitresses, painter's models and prostitutes. Once a model schoolboy, he
was also tubercular and the English writer Beatrice Hastings left him when
he decided to find his happiness and health in alcohol and drugs. She was
fed up with getting up early every day to write the articles and poetry
that put food on their table — while he slept until noon.
The young Italian, who had moved to Paris in 1910, forgot her soon
enough. He met the love of his life at Mardi Gras: a girl fourteen years
younger than himself, Jeanne Hebuterne. Friends warned him to keep away
from her because she came from a family which had sired celebrated
clerics. Her parents would find him a disgusting character. But
Modigliani
was not to be deterred.
The tragic aesthete who, despite the excesses of his Paris life, still retained at thirty-three the beauty of his youth, had
fallen deeply in love. He found in her the incarnation of the "lady with
the swan-like neck" whom he had painted many hundreds of times. It was
love at first sight for both of them and the power of love removed all
obstacles. Jeanne defied her family to be
Modigliani's permanent model. His fame grew, chiefly due to the series
of paintings of which Nude with Necklace is one. The critic Francis
Carco wrote in 1919 on the series: "Animal suppleness, waiting motionless
in abandonment of self, in delicious languor, has never been more
tellingly interpreted by a painter." Others praised
Modigliani's poetic
nudes as "hymns to a sensitive beauty".
The elegiac melancholy of these paintings reflects the tragedy and
uncertainty of their creator's own life. For the first time he had enough
money to live on, yet his health was collapsing. He died of meningitis on
24 January 1920. He was thirty-six and an incurable alcoholic. Jeanne
Hebuterne, who was nearly nine months pregnant, committed suicide the
following morning by jumping out of a window of her parents' fifth-floor
flat.
