Amedeo Modigliani stands as one of Italy's best-known painters and sculptors of the 20th century, posthumously renowned for his characteristic style and eccentric personality. Writing in the 1950s, Modigliani's daughter Jeanne was only a baby when her father died. Nevertheless, her interest in her father's short life resulted in this biography - the fruits of Jeanne's researches and conversations with those who remembered him are now considered valuable by art historians. We learn of the artist's early years in Italy, his journeys and work in France, his romances and excesses, and the challenges he faced selling his works. Though he had friends to lend him money when times were hard, Modigliani constantly grappled with poverty and illness. The final years of Modigliani's life saw his greatest yet most tragic romance, to the young art student Jeanne Hébuterne. A gifted painter in her own right, Jeanne fell in love with Modigliani and doted on him as his health faltered. When Modigliani expired from tuberculosis, Jeanne was inconsolable, and committed suicide two days later. It was not until the year 2000 that her artworks were showcased alongside her husband's, with the permission of her heirs. This biography includes more than 130 examples of the letters and artworks of Modigliani that the reader may appreciate and observe how his unique art progressed with the years.

“People like us . . . have different rights, different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” —Modigliani Amedeo (“Beloved of God”) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In Modigliani’s time, his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the new approaches of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. Jean Cocteau called Modigliani “our aristocrat” and said, “There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful. Alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.” In this major new biography, Meryle Secrest, one of our most admired biographers—whose work has been called “enthralling” (The Wall Street Journal); “rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written” (The New York Review of Books) —now 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 (“How beautiful he was, my god how beautiful,” said one of his models) . . . his training as an artist . . .and his influences, including the Italian Renaissance, particularly the art of Botticelli; Nietzsche’s theories of the artist as Übermensch, divinely endowed, divinely inspired; the monochromatic backgrounds of Van Gogh and Cézanne; the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified, masklike triangular faces, elongated silhouettes, puckered lips, low foreheads, and heads on exaggeratedly long necks. We see the ways in which Modigliani’s long-kept-secret illness from tuberculosis (it almost killed him as a young man) affected his work and his attitude toward life ; how consumption caused him to embrace fatalism and idealism, creativity and death; and how he used alcohol and opium with laudanum as an antispasmodic to hide the symptoms of the disease and how, because of it, he 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; how Modigliani became part of a life in the streets and a world of art and artists then in a transforming revolution; Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, et al.—and others more radical—Matisse, Derain, etc., all living within blocks of one another. Secrest’s book, written with unprecedented access to letters, diaries, and photographs never before seen, is an extraordinary revelation of a life lived in art . . . Here is Modigliani, the man and the artist, seemingly shy, delicate, a man on a desperate mission, masquerading as an alcoholic, cheating death again and again, and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however much time remained . . .

Achieving little recognition in his own lifetime, Amedeo Modigliani went on to become a highly influential expressionist artist after his untimely death in 1920. Jeanne Hebuterne was his last companion, his ever-faithful supporter. Although a talented artist in her own right, Jeanne is pulled into the abyss of Modigliani’s destructive ego, to tragic ends. … Jeanne Hebuterne… she who quietly slipped through her 19 years in the background of the scene, as if to apologize for being there. This is her story…

Anna Bright never wanted to write a novel. At least, that's what she tells herself. But a chance encounter with a famous novelist and a surprise gift of an art book cut a chink in Anna's resolve. The short, tragic life of Modigliani's mistress, Jeanne Hebuterne becomes an obsession and before she knows it, she has enrolled on a creative writing course, is writing about a fictional Jeanne and mixing with the literati. As her novel grows and takes on a life of its own, Anna feels her own life becoming increasingly irrelevant. She is absorbed by the story of Jeanne, who committed suicide aged 19 following the artist's death, jumping from a high window in Paris, pregnant with his child. When Anna is invited to take part in a televised literary competition, hosted by an unscrupulous writing guru, she agrees, but later regrets her choice. Under the gaze of the camera, she has become part of a TV circus; unlike the Bohemian Jeanne, she has sold out. Will she manage to save her sanity and her relationship, before she becomes a by-product of the literary world? A deceptively light satire on the modern writing and publishing world. Praise for Jacqui Lofthouse's novel 'The Temple of Hymen': "A remarkable, often beautiful and startling piece of writing. A considerable achievement." - John Mortimer. "Deceptive; entertaining and unusual" - Louis de Bernieres "A very impressive book... a superbly recreated historical period and a passionate investigation into femininity, all wrapped up in a mysterious and well-paced narrative." - Jonathan Coe Praise for Jacqui Lofthouse's novel 'Bluethroat Morning': "A classic tale of longing" - Time Out "A thriller full of twists and turns that keeps the reader guessing. Every word is magical, almost luminous" - Daily Mail"

An illuminating study of Amedeo Modigliani's early drawings and how they reflect the artist's conception of identity One of the great artists of the 20th century, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is celebrated for revolutionizing modern portraiture, particularly in his later paintings and sculpture. Modigliani Unmasked examines the artist's rarely seen early works on paper, offering revelatory insights into his artistic sensibilities and concerns as he developed his signature style of graceful, elongated figures. An Italian Sephardic Jew working in turn-of-the-century Paris, Modigliani embraced his status as an outsider, and his early drawings show a marked awareness of the role of ethnicity and race within society. Placing these drawings within the context of the artist's larger oeuvre, Mason Klein reveals how Modigliani's preoccupation with identity spurred the artist to reconceive the modern portrait, arguing that Modigliani ultimately came to think of identity as beyond national or cultural boundaries. Lavishly illustrated with the artist's paintings and over one hundred drawings collected by Dr. Paul Alexandre, Modigliani's close friend and first patron, this book provides an engaging and long overdue analysis of Modigliani's early body of work on paper.

A biographer explores the artist’s tragic life, and transcendent work, in early twentieth-century Paris—“a vibrant portrait of a deeply unhappy man” (Publishers Weekly). In 1920, at the age of thirty-five, Amedeo Modigliani died in poverty and neglect in Paris, much like a figure out of La Bohéme. 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 painting thrived on chaos, but his bohemian lifestyle, combined with a youthful case of tuberculosis, eventually took a fatal toll. 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. Today’s 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.