Amedeo Modigliani - SKETCHLINE

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1884 - 1920

Amedeo Modigliani

description

An Italian painter, sculptor and graphic artist of Jewish origin, who lived and worked in France.

One of the most famous masters of the early 20th century. The paintings created during the life of the artist had no success. They became extremely popular after his early departure from life and remain so now. At the “Christie’s” auction in 2015, his “Reclining Nude”, created in 1917, was bought for almost $170.5 million. In art history, the understandable term “Modigliani style” is used.

Key ideas:

– The main motive of Modigliani, both on the picturesque canvases and in sculpture, was a human being. Only a few landscapes of the artist are known; he was not interested in still lifes and the plot genre.

– In the early portraits, working in an expressive way, Modigliani was able to skillfully reproduce the individual characteristics of the models (“Jewish Woman”) and to bring the sharpness of the social characteristics of the heroes of the paintings to grotesque (“Diego Rivera”, “Mrs. Pompadour”, “Pablo Picasso”). In the first of the works of this genre “Jewish woman”, a densely painted canvas with dark background colors contrasts sharply with the subtle outlines of a woman’s face. Blue tones dominate here, giving the composition melancholy as opposed to the emotional collision of black and white waves. Soon they are replaced by a warm palette that always includes shades of brown.

– Characteristic features of the “Modigliani’s” portrait are connected with the master’s departure from direct pictorialism and with the advent of fascinating linear styling. Figures, acquiring smoothly curved and elongated shapes, are outlined with a clear contour, while the color goes into a restrained segment including combinations of ocher, gray and black tones, only diluted with a certain amount of smears of green and blue colors.
– Almond-shaped, sometimes “alien” eyes are a kind of “business card” of portraits by Modigliani. Filled with black or blue, they make the look deep and even more elusive. Later, bringing the linear stylization to the individual recognition of the author’s brush, Modigliani represented figures in a spiral form, as if delineating intersecting parabolas and completed most often with the tilted shape of a face (“Yellow sweater”, “Jeanne Hébuterne in a shirt”, etc.). At the first presentation, scandalously famous nudes became widely popular, as they attract by quiveringly-exciting lines of tight forms and the rhythms of the bends of beautiful bodies.

– The master transferred his style to sculptural works. Heads referring either to Asian or to African art (“pillars of tenderness”), look like idols and amaze the viewer with their significance. All work of Modigliani, which is not very easy to classify, is sometimes considered somewhat separate from the main trends in the visual arts of the first two decades of the 20th century.

Amedeo Modigliani

On Artist

flow

Symbolism

Impressionism

Renaissance

Neoimpressionism

Fauvism

Modern

Folk art

friends

Oscar Gilia

Maurice Utrillo

Beatrice Hastings

Jeanne Hebuterne

artists

Pablo Picasso

Paul Cezanne

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Constantin Brancusi

Giovanni Fattori

Auguste Rodin

Ludwig meidner

By Artist

flow

Expressionism

friends

Oscar Gilia

Maurice Utrillo

Chaim Soutine

Jacques Lipschitz

Diego Rivera

Moise Kisling

Max Jacob

Jacob Epstein

Huan Gris

Gino Severini

Marevna

Zuguharu Fujita

Pierre Auguste Renoir

Giorgio de Chirico

Andre Derain

artists

Frida Kahlo

Henry Moore

description

Mediums: oil, canvas. Dimensions: 99,06 x 63,5 сm. Location: Tate Gallery, London, England.

1918

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Mediums: oil, canvas. Location: Metropolitan Museum, New York, NY, USA.

1919

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Mediums: oil, canvas. Dimensions: 92 x 60 сm. Location: Museum of Contemporary Art-Center Pompidou, Paris.

1918

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Mediums: oil, canvas. Dimensions: 92 x 60 сm. Location: National Gallery, Washington D.C., USA.

1917

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Mediums: oil, canvas. Location: Art Museum, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

1916

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Mediums: oil, canvas. Dimensions: 55,2 x 46,4 сm. Location: Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY, USA.

1915 - 1916

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Mediums: oil, canvas. Dimensions: 61 см x 52 сm. Location: Art Institute, Chicago, USA.

1915

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Mediums: oil, canvas. Location: private collection, Geneva, Switzerland.

1915

description

Mediums: oil, canvas. Dimensions: 55 x 46 сm. Location: private collection.

1908