Modigliani : a life / Meryle Secrest.

1st ed.

9780307263681
0307263681

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

English

xxiii, 387 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

ND623.M67 S43 2011

759.5 B

Amedeo Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh's. In his time, his work was seen as an oddity, a link between such portraitists as Whistler and Sargent and the modernist approaches of Gauguin and Picasso. In this major new biography, Meryle Secrest gives us a fully realized portrait of one of the twentieth century's master painters and sculptors: his upbringing, a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished but genteel Italian family; his going to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks; his training as an artist--and his influences: the Italian Renaissance, particularly Botticelli; Nietzsche's theories of the artist as Übermensch; the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified, masklike faces. We see how his secret illness--tuberculosis--affected his work and his fatalistic attitude toward life, and how he used alcohol and opium to hide the symptoms and thus came to be seen as a dissolute alcoholic. And throughout, we see the Paris that Modigliani lived in, a city in dynamic flux where art was still a noble cause in a transforming revolution.--From publisher description.

"A Borzoi book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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