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That Brilliant Bohemian Modigliani
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19024 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
1,970 Words |
| Author
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Mavis Guinard
Mavis Guinard, a writer on the arts, lives in Switzerland. |
Like Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906 solidly grounded in academic painting. Unlike Picasso and others, the 20-year-old Italian painter refused to explore avant-garde currents that fascinated the Montmartre and Montparnasse painters of his time. He chose not to join--nor did he found--any movement. Building on his early classic training and touched by the simple beauty of primitive art, he cultivated a style of his own. He is best known for the portraits of the last five years of his life, from 1915 to 1920: elegant elongated "close-ups" of friends, art dealers, mistresses of a day, or models picked from the streets. All are stamped with the unmistakable "Modigliani look": pensive, with haunting wide eyes set in oval faces poised on seemingly unending necks, tapered hands. His last love, Jeanne Hebuterne, was the archetype.
Among the few influences he incorporated into his art were flat colored surfaces that hint at Cezanne. Aside from this, and short forays into pointillism and Cubism, his inspiration reached back to the canons of early Italian painting or further still to primitive art Archaic Greek, Celtic, Asiatic, and, above all, African art were reflected in his hieratic stone sculptures.
Gianadda Exhibits
The Modigliani exhibit held last summer in Martigny, once a busy Roman crossroads between France and Italy, proved to be one of the hardest for the Pierre Gianadda Foundation to round up. A striking modern bunker of a museum erected over the remains of a Roman temple, the foundation was built over twenty years ago by Leonard Gianadda as a memorial to his brother after his death in a plane crash.
The Gianadda exhibits have grown in stature through the years. A first show, unfortunately infested with fakes, was mercilessly panned by the critics. Heeding them, builder Leonard Gianadda has since surrounded himself with such competent advisers that the summer show in the heart of Switzerland's Valais mountains has attracted exceptional works (Giacometti, Paul Klee, Rodin, Henry Moore, Goya, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others) netted from all over the world by Gianadda, who lacks neither persuasion nor persistence. "For Modigliani," he admits, "there is no single collection to form a nucleus of a show. It took several years to obtain the loans from museums and private collectors who often have only a single work out of Modigliani's small oeuvre."
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