Art Styles in 20th century Art Map

 

Amedeo Modigliani

 

(1884 - 1920)
 

Nothing But a Mute Affirmation of Life

 

Frans Hellens 
1919 

"She was gentle, shy, quiet and delicate. A little bit depressive", was how the writer Charles-Albert Cingria characterised Modigliani's companion in his final years. Modigliani painted her lost in thought, removed from reality, time and place, and extremely beautiful. She was a young woman with reddish hair and pale skin; the almost stereotypical rendering of her face always reminds the viewer that she was painted by Modigliani. The fusion of painter and model, apparent in the portraits of his Paris friends, here reaches its most complete. Modigliani subjects Jeanne entirely to his style. In these pictures, he and Jeanne are one. Nevertheless, there is something anonymous about this mutual subjugation. In the same measure that Modigliani's painting style is always shaped by the same characteristics and thus appears objectified, the model becomes an icon of a person freed of all character and psychology. The only item of importance is the form, defined by long, elegant curves and yet still a body. When looking at the model, the viewer constantly has to decide whether this is a mere silhouette or its corporeal completion. This oscillating impression is heightened by Modigliani's use of colour. Applied in gradations, it defines rounded forms and lends the picture heights and depths, bringing linearity and volume into a balanced unity. Modigliani achieves the same harmonious effect in these portraits through the calculated juxtaposition of curvilinear and static elements. Modigliani always balances out any excess of large, sweeping curves by adding long, vertical or horizontal straight lines.

Red Haired Girl 
1918 

Gypsy Woman with Baby 
1918 

Seated Woman with Child
1919 

This use of contrast, whereby Modigliani shows himself to be a master of traditional composition methods, is intensified in these late pictures by an almost explosive palette. Modigliani had never before used such contrasted colours as primary red, blue and yellow, and the secondaries obtained from their mixture. The red of a petticoat against a pale-blue background, the yellow of Jeanne's long, turtleneck pullover, the violet of a skirt, the strong colour contrast between red and yellow in the Portrait of Lunia Czechovska, and especially the turquoise to emerald-green background of the picture of Jeanne in a white shirt - these all give an impression of how Modigliani was slowly turning into a virtuoso of colour. The colour contrasts that he thereby achieves are often harsh and cool. With his unconventional use of colour he avoids what would have been simply pleasing effects. He gives the quiet grace of his models a hint of eccentricity and thus completely removes them from reality, making them into artificial figures who only exist in the realm of the pictures. The emphasis on the artificial in art has its historical predecessor in Mannerism, which emerged in Italy in the sixteenth century as a counter-movement to the Renaissance. Several critics of Modigliani have described his work as mannered and established links to the tradition of Italian Mannerism.
Unlike the often puzzling, intellectual content of Mannerist pictures, however, Modigliani's works are purely visual and can only be understood by looking at them. They do not represent a new aesthetic theory, but rather are pictures of the people with whom Modigliani lived. Nevertheless, they do assume a knowledge of how the human countenance has been rendered throughout the history of art, for it is only in relation to this history that one grasps Modigliani's uniqueness. Despite all subjectivity, his style strives towards objectification, anonymity, and duration. The abbreviated rendering of his models causes the observer to become so preoccupied with Modigliani's creation that he begins to think about the character of those about whom so little is revealed in the pictures. Faced with the isolation of the people in the pictures, he starts to raise questions about human existence. Modigliani does not even have the beginning of an answer. What he offers is a unified mood that exists in tranquillity, introspection and repose, and in his best pictures he succeeds in presenting this inner composure in a tautly-balanced form.

Portrait de madame L 

During his lifetime, Modigliani would continuously occupy himself with the depiction of the human form. But it was only shortly before his death in 1919, that he also painted himself in a self-portrait. The painting, executed in light, pastel tones, shows the painter sitting on a chair, dressed in a thick jacket, with a scarf slung around his neck. In his right hand he holds a palette, which contains the bright colours which distinguish his later pictures. His head is tilted slightly back and, judging from the expression on his well-proportioned face, he seems lost in reverie and unapproachable. Above all, however, it is again the eyes that play a decisive role in this impression of withdrawal. These eyes are neither open nor closed. What they perceive permeates in equal measure from both the outside and the inside; at one and the same time they represent subjective vision and orientation towards reality. In the painter's indifferent eyes is an expression of instinctive, unconscious observance which is utterly calm in the face of every distinction drawn between reality and unreality, for he is aware of his freedom to render this according to his own will.

Portrait of Anna Zborowska 
1917 

Portrait of Anna Zborowska 
1918 

Portrait of Anna Zborowska 
1919 

The English art historian and novelist, John Berger, once noted that Modigliani's paintings are amongst the most popular of the twentieth century. According to Berger, this exceptional popularity, paired with a certain scepticism amongst art critics, has its roots in the fact that Modigliani's pictures are imbued with love and tenderness for the people depicted in them. One could add a further reason: at the beginning of this century, Modigliani still held fast to an intact image of human beings. It is an image determined by repose and freedom, by elegance and grace and sometimes also by melancholy. "Happiness is an angel with a serious face", Modigliani wrote on a postcard to his friend, Paul Alexandre, from Livorno in June 1913; this sentence expresses both the poetic and contemplative attitude of the artist. He certainly cannot be considered the "admirable painter of pain" for whom life would have been unbearable "without suffering as the source of the creative urge", as claimed by Gustave Coquiot and the artist Othon Friesz (1879— 1949). Modigliani, susceptible to illness since childhood, lived a free and dissipated life and left behind a large and important body of work. Although sculpture was an important milestone in his development, his strengths clearly lay in painting and perhaps even more in drawing. He died on January 24, 1920, in the Charite in Paris from complications resulting from tuberculosis, and is buried beside Jeanne Hebuterne, who committed suicide the day after he died, in the Pere Lachaise cemetery. A man of little success during his lifetime, Modigliani's fame - already becoming apparent at the end of his life - ironically escalated in the year of his death, and has steadily increased to the present day.