@article{436460,
      recid = {436460},
      author = {Secrest, Meryle. and Modigliani, Amedeo,},
      title = {Modigliani : a life /},
      publisher = {Alfred A. Knopf,},
      address = {New York :},
      pages = {xxiii, 387 p. :},
      year = {2011},
      note = {"A Borzoi book."},
      abstract = {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.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/436460},
}