Here I mix personal opinion with the opinion of experts I trust, please have in mind that personal means I do not pretend to create a scholar text...
Not a very large life work.
Started painting at 14 years (b.1884) so it covers the work produced during less than 21 years (died January 1920) but what is really interesting is just 4 years
(Picasso´s means more than 80 years and much more than 50,000 works).
It's even more easy to see his work in perspective if we take the word of Frank Perls, one of the main experts/dealers in Modigliani during the 50's to 70's:
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"Modigliani did not develop his own style until 1915-16".
"He came into his own in 1916".
"Those last four years; that's really all that Modigliani is".
see external link>
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It's a classical myth he was always drunk, stoned and out of his mind, Looking at his work, this just can't be true...
Try to get drunk and paint or what ever you do to live, maybe one time it can go swell but not for 21 years (his work is always a genuine master composition).
Ok, he lived a bohemian avant garde life playing on the border line, but his work resembles the classical tuscan perspective, linear and golden perfection (drunk or stoned he could not reach that perfection for such a long time).
If we give credit to his daughter, Jeanne. he never painted drunk or stoned,
(an easy explanation: he was always short of money and oil and canvas were very expensive).
Jeanne, a toddler when her parents died, was raised by the father’s sister in Italy.
She knew him only from letters and documents, she died in 1984, leaving a very controversial art resource, new works, printings and bronze serial sculptures.
In any case, leaving myths and gossips on his bohemian life aside, the main issue is that Modigliani recovers the glorious past from Ucello, Masaccio, Michelozzi, Gozzoli and many other great masters.
Created a new way, an art style than can't be followed by others (there is no school of), amazing, fresh, opposite to the main tendencies or trendy styles of his time, but in his time.
As the good art, he relies in a background retrieved from the past and presents a new way and own creation, a new art style.
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Body of work:
1- Drawings......................................... click here>>
2- Sculpture........................................ click here>>
3- Paintings......................................... click here>> |
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PLEASE NOTE: AMEDEO MODIGLIANI NEVER DID PRINT EDITIONS, BRONZE SCULPTURES OR ANY TYPE OF SERIAL PRODUCTION
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