Amedeo Modigliani

Modigliani was born in 1884 into a Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno, the Tuscan port that had long taken in those fleeing persecution. His youth was spent in Italy with the art of the ancient world and the Renaissance in front of him, and it stayed in his work: the column of a neck, the tilt of a carved head.

He arrived in Paris in 1906 and fell in with the painters and sculptors who were tearing art open, Picasso and Brâncuși among them. From the Italians of the past and the avant-garde of the present he took only what served the face and the figure, and everything else he let go.

For five years, from 1909 to 1914, sculpture came first: heads carved in stone, their features narrowed and tilted, close enough to masks that by 1912 he was showing them beside the Cubists of the Section d'Or at the Salon d'Automne. When the stone ran out, the carving moved into paint.

The subjects barely changed for the rest of his life: portraits and full figures, heads and seated bodies, in images and in the sculpture alike. He drew people rather than things, and he drew them as though each face were a sculpture turned slightly toward the light.

The several dozen nudes he painted between 1916 and 1919 are what the world knows him by. They were made under the wing of his dealer Léopold Zborowski, who lent his apartment, found the models and materials, and paid a small daily sum so the painter could keep working. His only one-man show in his lifetime, in Paris in 1917, was shut by the police on its opening day.

Success never reached him. He died of tubercular meningitis in Paris in 1920, at thirty-five, and the fame arrived only afterwards, growing steadily until his paintings stood among the most sought after of the modern age.