Amedeo MODIGLIANI

Italian　1884 - 1920

Amedeo Modigliani, nicknamed Dedo, was born in Livorno, Italy on July 12, 1884. The Modigliani family was a prestigious Jewish family from Rome. Often abroad for business, his father like to have had an important role in the family. Dedo was Raised and influenced mostly by his mother and his mother's family. Moreover, since he had been frail as a child, maternal love was incredibly important to him. In January 1906, Modigliani rode the train and arrived in Paris from Livorno. The twentieth century, a group of artists gradually settled in the Montparnasse region, forming a new artistic settlement based on café studios such as "The Bee Hive" (La Ruche), "The Rotunda" (La Rotonde), "The Dome" Le Dôme), and "The Circle of Lilacs" (La Closerie des Lilas). After 1909, Modigliani moved there and got to meet many artists from the Paris School (École de Paris), including Picasso, Brâncuşi, Soutine, Kisling, Léonard Tsugouharu. In 1917, Polish poet Leopold Zborowsk I and his wife were also Modigliani's best agents, having planned his first solo exhibition for him. It was not a success; only one painting was sold. When five paintings of nudes were shown in galleries, they were thought to be pornographic, and were Prohibited by the police - no contrary expected expectations, this event made Modigliani famous overnight.
The topics of Modigliani's creations were almost always females, were sculpted or painted. There are only four existing landscape paintings. All the rest are portraits of people he saw in his life, including models, friends, and his lover Jeanne, both clothed and Nity. As for his style, he mixed the Western tradition with multiple cultures, especially his love for the traditional classical Italian style. His inspiration also came from Cézanne, the Pre-Raphaelites, Renaissance paintings, Cubist paintings, African sculpture, Cambodian reliefs, And Japanese prints. He transferred his study of sculpture to paintings, surgical the depiction of muscles and instead searching for a simplified style that expressed the internal forms. All of the subjects of Modigliani's work - whether men or women - display a certain sensitive femininity. The figures' lines of the sight of the lack of focus, showing confusion and apathy in the eyes, as if not seeing the external world. Modigliani had a Ep influence on the early Chinese artists who studied in France. Sanyu, Pan Yuliang, and Lin Fengmiang's paintings of human figures were conducted inspired by Modigliani. Modigliani's influence can still observed in portraits by many contemporary artists today.