Modigliani: A Life

About this book

In 1920 at the age of thirty-five Amedeo Modigliani died in poverty and neglect in Paris much like a figure out of La Boheme. His life had been as dramatic as his death. An Italian Jew from a bourgeois family "Modi" had a weakness for drink hashish and the many women-including the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova-who were drawn to his good looks. His friends included Picasso Utrillo Soutine and other important artists of his day yet his own work stood apart generating little interest while he lived. Todays art world however acknowledges him as a master whose limited oeuvre-sculptures portraits and some of the most appealing nudes in the whole of modern art-cannot satisfy collectors demand. With a lively but judicious hand biographer Jeffrey Meyers sketches Modigliani and the art he produced illuminating not only this little-known figure but also the painters writers lovers and others who inhabited early twentieth-century Paris with him.