Amedeo Modigliani in Genoa
The exhibition, which will be held until 16 July 2017 in the Doge's apartment in Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, curated by Rudy Chiappini, aims to illustrate the creative path of Amedeo Modigliani by addressing the main components of his short and fruitful career.
In life, Amedeo Modigliani did not experience the satisfaction of seeing his talent recognized or fully appreciated by the public and the market. The long and exhausting search for consensus, pursued with obsessive determination, did not take place in that short interval of time that constitutes the unrepeatable career of one of the absolute protagonists of modern figurative painting, author of the most extraordinary, intense and fascinating series of portraits of the art of the twentieth century. Aftermath were the acknowledgments, the great exhibitions, the re-evaluation of the critics who only after a long indifference discovered the value of the pictorial research and the scope of Modigliani's art.
With the disappearance of the man, who died on January 24, 1920 at the age of 36, the myth that took hold and transformed a difficult and tormented life into a legend immediately blossomed, sometimes neglecting artistic merits to put the emphasis on the artist. cursed, prisoner of a burned-out existence, protagonist of a rebellion as an end in itself, of eccentric behavior bordering on scandal, of excesses of alcohol, drugs and women.
Undoubtedly the Livorno painter, who arrived in Paris in 1906 attracted by the charm of a lively and euphoric city, thirsty for experimentation and daring provocations, was one of the most charismatic figures and one of the most representative personalities of that environment, forge of modernity and of the historical avant-gardes.
However, what attracts him to the streets of Montmartre and Montparnasse is not simply the charm of a free and unconventional life. What really attracts Modigliani and his fellow adventurers from Kisling to Lipchitz, from Utrillo to Soutine to Van Dongen is something else. It is the awareness that their fervor, their existential revolt are not thrills of youth but represent the feverish anguish of the time that is consumed and of the life that escapes. It is the need to arrive at a new language, an art that has its roots in the fertile soil of everyday life but at the same time knows how to immerse itself in the depth of consciousness.
The exhibition of Palazzo Ducale pays particular attention to the central aspect of Modigliani's research, namely his predilection for portraits. There are numerous paintings that the artist dedicates to occasional models but also to friends and adventure companions, also protagonists of the Parisian cultural life of the turn of the century.
Through his works, the Livornese bears witness to the effervescence of the Parisian artistic and cultural environment of those years where great patrons and merchants such as Paul Alexandre, Paul Guillaume and Leopold Zborowsky coexist and meet alongside writers such as Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, to artists such as Diego Rivera, Pinchus Krémègne, Henri Laurens, Jean Cocteau, Léopold Survage, Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, protagonists of an unrepeatable season of renewal of artistic languages.
His painting is of an extreme, introverted, introspective quality, devoted to the portrait which undoubtedly represents the privileged element through which to highlight the stylistic code of Modigliani who first introduces a very close psychological relationship with the subject and then progressively moves towards a purity and absolute formal elegance.
His investigation focuses on the human figure in an attempt to grasp the profound character of his characters, beyond the anecdotal of everyday life, without the need to describe the environment in which the model lives, the objects that surround it. He is not interested in interiors but in inner life. His early portraits highlight his interest in the simplification of forms and in a solid and essential composition which reveal his attention to Cézanne's lesson.
The war years allowed Modigliani to get closer to the other protagonists of the historical avant-gardes who remained in Paris and in particular to those of Picasso's circle. Among these the writer Max Jacob who in 1915 introduced him to the merchant Paul Guillaume. Modigliani takes advantage of the frequentations of him and of the artists who surround him to develop an absolutely unpublished vocabulary of the portrait. Although always perfectly recognizable, the faces tend to a formal essentiality never seen before. The artist manages to blend with great skill the likeness of the depicted subject - executed from life or from memory - with an absolutely personal style.
Exemplary in this perspective are the portraits of Moise Kisling, with whom Modigliani had formed a strong and deep-rooted friendship, of the gallery owner Georges Cheron, of the painter Chaim Soutine, companion in adventures and many times chosen as a model.
Modigliani's interest in female figures was also intense and passionate. There are numerous anonymous models who, found in Parisian cafes or met on the street and bewitched by his seducer charm, pose for him. But also many important presences in his love and intellectual life such as the English journalist Beatrice Hastings, Lunia Czechowska, longtime friend, Hanka Zborowska, wife of her merchant, and the young partner Jeanne Hébuterne, with whom he will have a daughter.
Starting from 1916, the poet and merchant of Polish origins Léopold Zborowski is strongly committed to making known the work of Modigliani who creates an extraordinary series of nudes exhibited amid a thousand controversies at the Berthe Weil Gallery the following year. The health of the Livorno artist deteriorated inexorably even if his portraits painted starting from 1917 reveal a further stylistic evolution.
Modigliani has developed unmistakable linguistic characteristics, attributable to the accentuation of the value of the line as a fundamental compositional element and to the elegant sinuous and sensual elongation of the figure, which have the function of attracting the person depicted in the sentimental area of the artist, in an act poetic unifier between the painter and his model.
These peculiarities develop further in the artist's last years. His paintings take on a wider breath, the palette clears and even the backgrounds progressively take on a diffused luminosity, the pictorial material becomes more fluid and the characters are delimited by a softer line. Significant examples of this new approach are painted with great delicacy such as La jeune Lolotte, as the splendid Girl in blue and as the refined and ethereal Young Man with red hair (The Student), with very pure contours.
Modigliani himself, referring to his portraits, reveals: «To work I need a living being, to see him in front of me. Abstraction tires me, kills me and is like a dead end ». His creative path embodies and fully reflects his temperament and the artist reveals himself completely through the emblematic nature of his art, an intimate poetic and timeless testimony of a sublime beauty.
