Modigliani

Text on the Back - Modigliani'I want a short but intense life' ('une vie brève mais intense'), Amedeo Modigliani once said about himself. And that wish was granted. Aged thirty six when he died, he had lived up to the perfect image of the bohemian: dead poor, neglected, having ruined scores of women and destroyed his own weak constitution with drink and drugs. His death became a sensation in itself, when it was reported in the Parisian press that the woman who had shared his last years had immediately committed suicide after the event; soon all his famous - and no-so-famous - contemporaries followed this up with colourful stories and anecdotes about his misdeeds under the influence of hashish and absinthe.These were Paris' high days, it was the centre of art: Modigliani had his studio in the same renowned 'Bateau Lavoir' in Montmartre as Pocasso, Max Jacob, Kees van Dongen and Juan Gris; in 'La Ruche' he had befriended Brancusi, Cocteau, Blaise Cendrars. But Modigliani did not follow the grand stream of new ideas breaking forth after 1900. He disliked the Fauves, Cubism and Futurism, and are Historians customarily place him amongst the Expressionists of the Ecole de Paris. His first love was scullpture - everybody looking at his stylised representation of the proportions of the human body will immediately recognise this- and he followed this call for a short period, but poverty and invreasing fruilty forced him to limit himself again to painting and drawing.