Remembering Italian Jewish Artist Amedeo Modigliani (1886-1920)

Helsinki, Finland. Large sign for Modigliani exhibit at Helsinki airport. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber November, 2016.

Remembering Italian Jewish Artist Amedeo Modigliani (1886-1920)
by Samuel D. Gruber
 
Today is the anniversary of the death of  Italian Jewish artist Amedeo Modigliani, who died young of tuberculosis in the heyday of the School of Paris, and whose popularity continues to grow decade by decade.  Born in a Jewish family in Livorno, Italy, he spent his artistic career in Paris. Even so, worldwide, he may the best known Italian painter of the 20th century, surpassing Balla, Boccioni, de Chirico, Morandi, Burri and so many more. His story and his star rival Van Gogh's in art-celebrity annals (2 movies have been made of his life). 

More than the cubists, Modigliani was able to take some precepts of modernism and apply them to traditional - and still recognizable genres.  Though all his many portraits are stylized and unmistakably his, the subjects are recognizable.  He was a very social artist and his portraits of his many artist and writers friends and patrons help us to populate one of the most fertile periods of European art.

Modigliani was also a Jewish artist.  Though in upbringing., language, and religious identity he was quite different from the many Yiddish speaking East European artists in Paris, he was exceptional close friends with many of them, especially Chaim Soutine and Jacques Lipchitz, as well as the American Jewish artist Jacob Epstein. His own Sephardi roots in Livorno and elsewhere were deep and though he was not known to be religious, he overtly and often defiantly identified himself as Jewish, sometimes introducing himself "as an artist and a Jew."

Amedeo Modigliani. Caryatide Head, drawing, 1911

Amadeo Modigliani. Portrait of Jean Cocteau, 1916. Perlman Foundation on long-term loan to Princeton University Art Museum

Amadeo Modigliani. Portrait of Moise Kisling, 1915

Amadeo Modigliani. Portrait of Juan Gris, 1915. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And then there are the nudes. Few artists have been as unashamedly in love with the female body, presenting nudes with a bold confidence hardly seen since the Rubens. There is no rosy soft-focus of Renoir, or the statuesque perfection of Bouguereau and other soft-porn academic painters of the previous generation.  Modigliani's nudes are real women - or at least real bodies - of flesh and blood and taste and smell.  God know, when I was teenager I was certainly mesmerized!  These works - which now fetch some of the world's highest prices for art - were commissioned by Modigliani's friend and dealer Léopold Zborowski, who provided  his apartment,  models, and painting materials. This was beneficial to both - Modigliani needed money (he was alcoholic and drug-addicted) and Zborowski  paid him  fifteen to  twenty francs each day for his work.  

When exhibited, the nudes caused a great sensation - positive and negative - the show was cited for obscenity. So the nudes in many ways stand alone. Though Modigliani had seriously studied the nude since a teenage art student, these works were unlike his thousands of drawings often created in a passionate frenzy, or his portraits of friends, done as much for friendship as cash. The nudes were conceived of as a commercial venture. And brilliantly so.

Exhibition: London's Ben Uri Gallery Hosts Major Jacques Lipchitz Drawing Exhibition

Exhibition: London's Ben Uri Gallery Hosts Major Jacques Lipchitz Drawing Exhibition
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) The Ben Uri Gallery in London will open a major exhibition of over 150 drawings by famed Lithuania-born Paris School artist Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973). Jacques Lipchitz, Master Drawings: The Anatomy of a Sculptor will open on Wednesday 6th May, 2009.

The exhibition spans 60 years of the career of Lipchitz, known as a 'life long cubist," but whose work - as is well demonstrated in his drawings - was as much expressive as analytic. According to the Ben Uri announcement, the exhibition of this works (from an American collection) is the first British museum survey of Lipchitz since the 1986 exhibition The Lipchitz Gift, Models for Sculpture at the Tate Gallery. Lipchitz's preparatory work was featured in the traveling exhibition Selected Master Drawings in 1974-75. This present exhibition will expose a new generation to Lipchitz's energetic style that in subject matter combined, myth, dream, symbol and memory into a unique graphic and sculptural language.

This year is the 100th anniversary of Lipchitz's arrival in Paris, where he became a leading figure in what came to be called the Paris School, where he was also a leader among the many East European immigrant artists. Born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz in Druskieniki, Lithuania in 1891, the artist was just 18 when he came to Paris. Two years later, in 1911, he moved to the Paris studio and apartment at 54, Rue du Montparnasse where lived his friend and fellow Litvak, Lazar Berson. Berson later moved on to London, and in July 1915 founded the Ben Uri.

Lipchitz left Paris in 1940, fleeing to Toulouse after the German occupation of the city. In 1941 Amercian diplomat Varian Fry helped smuggle the artist to New York. While Lipchitz is much celebrated in Israel, where his monumental sculpture Our Tree of Life (1962-72) adorns the grounds of Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, he did not travel to Israel until 1963. Though he died in Capri (Italy) in 1973, he is buried in Jerusalem.

At Ben Uri Gallery, 108A Boundary Road, London NW8 0RH until 26 July.

For more information see: www.benuri.org.uk / info@benuri.org.uk