Suffused With Melancholy

Suffused with melancholy - that's how the late works of Modigliani have been described. Amadeo Modigliani was an early 20th Century Italian-Jewish visual artist who worked in France, living the life of an archetypal Bohemian, painting, suffering, and finally dying at only age 35 in 1920. You may recognize the distinctive and original Modigliani style - dark portraits of ladies, frequently seated, many with angular faces, an impassive demeanor, and empty eyes.

I went today with the Sister to the Royal Academy at Piccadilly, where a special exhibition on "Modigliani and his Models" was being staged. I've long been mesmerized by his haunting portraits, and once, a Modigliani painting had even been presented for sale at the Opera Gallery in Singapore's Ngee Ann City. I recall wishing that I had a million dollars to go buy myself the Modigliani to hang in my bathroom.

The exhibition at the Royal Academy brought together many of the portraits Modigliani painted during his later years. Many of them centred upon key female figures in his life then - Beatrice Hastings, with whom he had a tempestuous affair, Hanka Zborowska, the wife of his dealer, Lunia Czechowska, a friend and house guest of his dealer, and also the tragic Jeanne Hébuterne, a young lady who fell for Modigliani, and who threw herself and their unborn child to their deaths two days after Modigliani's own demise.

I wonder how many portraits in total did Modigliani create. Many of the works on display were borrowed from Moma and the Met in New York and from various private owners. The Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia which I visited earlier this year alone owns around six Modigliani portraits, but none of them were presented for this exhibition. My own favourite is an unnamed 1916 Modigliani nude that usually hangs at the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, and I was happy to see it on display today. Due to exhibition restrictions, I wasn't able to capture any image of any of the works, but more information on the man and his creations can be found here - assuming that the Royal Academy does not trash the pages after the exhibition completes its run.