Modigliani – His Tragic Life And Death

After Amedeo recovered from the second pleurisy attack, he travelled accompanied by his mother throughout southern Italy, visiting destinations such as Rome, Capri, Naples, Venice and Florence.

At the age of 11, Amedeo’s mother wrote in her diary: “The child’s character is still so unformed that I cannot say what I think of it. He behaves like a spoiled child, but he does not lack intelligence. We shall have to wait and see what is inside this chrysalis. Perhaps an artist?” Amedeo is known having painted and drawn from a very young age.

Despite his mother’s misgivings that launching Amedeo on an art school education would impinge upon her son’s other studies, she indulged the young boy’s true passion for the subject.

At the age of 14, while being ill with typhoid fever, the teenager raved in his delirium that he wished, above all else, to observe the art paintings in Florence’s Uffizi and the Palazzo Pitti.

As the local museum in Livorno only displayed a limited number of creations by masters of the Italian Renaissance, the stories he had heard about the sublime works held in Florence intrigued Modigliani, and to him it was a source of considerable despair, in his bad physical condition, that he may never get the opportunity to observe the works in person. His mother undertook to enrol Amedeo with Livorno’s finest art painting master, Guglielmo Micheli.

Amedeo moved to Paris in 1906, then the avant-garde’s focal point. In fact, the painter’s arrival at the artistic experimentation’s centre coincided with the arrival of two other foreign artists, Juan Gris and Gino Severini, who were to leave their marks upon the international art scene as well.

Within a year Modigliani’s reputation had changed significantly. The artist transformed himself from a dapper academician painter into a kind of prince of vagabonds. Modigliani drank heavily, carried on regular affairs, and used huge amounts of hashish and absinthe. While being drunk at social gatherings, he would occasionally strip himself naked.

During his first years in the French capital, Modigliani created art at a furious pace. The artist was sketching constantly, drawing as many as a hundred works a day. However, numerous of his sketches were lost—erased by the artist as inferior, left behind in his regular address changes, or given to his girlfriends who didn’t save them.

In 1909, Modigliani went back to Livorno, exhausted and sickly due to his fast lifestyle. However, soon he returned to Paris, this time hiring an atelier in Montparnasse. Modigliani created a series of portraits of friends and contemporary artists in Montparnasse, immortalising persons such as Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Moise Kisling, Chaim Soutine, Diego Rivera, Jean Cocteau, Marie “Marevna” Vorobyev-Stebeslka, Max Jacob and Blaise Cendrars.

In the summer of 1916, Russian sculptor Chana Orloff introduced Modigliani to Jeanne Hébuterne, a pretty 19-year-old art student and model. Hébuterne’s conservative Roman Catholic family did forbid her relationship with the Jewish artist, whom they thought of as a bohemian derelict.

Despite her parents’ objections, they were soon living together, and although Jeanne was his life’s current love, the couple’s public scenes became more legendary than Modigliani’s drunken individual exhibitions.

Modigliani’s first individual exhibition took place at the Berthe Weill Gallery on December 3, 1917. Paris’ chief of police was shocked by the nude paintings and forced closing the exhibition a few hours after its introduction. While living in Nice, Jeanne Hébuterne became pregnant and on November 29, 1918 their daughter with the name of Jeanne was born.

Although Amedeo continued to create art paint, his health was deteriorating quickly, and his alcohol-intoxicated blackouts became more regular. In 1920, after having not heard from the painter for more than a week, while checking on the family, his downstairs neighbor found a delirious Modigliani in bed holding onto Jeanne Hébuterne who was almost nine months pregnant.

A doctor came to see Modigliani, but there wasn’t much that could be done as he was dying due to the tubercular meningitis, incurable at that time. On January 24, 1920 Amedeo Clemente Modigliani passed away. His funeral was enormous, attended by numerous members of the artistic communities in Montparnasse and Montmartre.

A devastated Jeanne Hébuterne was braught to her parents’ house, where, two days after the artist’s death, she jumped from the building’s fifth-floor, killing herself and her unborn baby. Modigliani was buried at Paris’ famous Père Lachaise Cemetery.

The love of his life, Jean Hébuterne was buried at the Cimetière de Bagneux Cemetery near Paris, and her embittered family allowed Jeanne’s remains to be moved resting beside Modigliani in 1930.

Amedeo Modigliani died as a poor man, managing just a sole exhibition during his life and exchanging his artworks for food in restaurants. His reputation has soared since his death. A documentary, a play, three movies and nine novels, a play, a documentary have been devoted to Modigliani’s tragic life.

By: stuart white

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Stuart White is a passionate art connoisseur. For more articles about famous art painters he advises; Art Painting Stories