Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)
Tête de Jeune Fille (Louise)
Amedeo Modigliani, an Italian Jew of Sephardic
ancestry, was born into a sophisticated bourgeois milieu in
Livorno, where he received his earliest artistic education. In 1906
he left his homeland for Paris, where he enrolled at the renowned
Académie Colarossi. His early work shows the influence of the
Fauves, as well of as Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, and Picasso,
but it failed to impress the public and went unsold.
Modigliani's health, already impaired by tuberculosis, was
undermined by the difficulties of life in Montmartre, in
combination with poverty, alcohol, and drugs. Feeling
misunderstood, he decided to devote himself entirely to sculpture.
In 1909 Modigliani moved to Montparnasse, where he became
acquainted with the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi and the
Polish sculptor Elie Nadelman. Inspired by their work and by the
contemporary craze for African folk art, Modigliani made around
twenty-five sculptures and countless preliminary studies between
1909 and 1913. His lack of money forced him to move frequently, and
he briefly stayed in La Ruche during this period. There he met
Moïse Kisling, Ossip Zadkine, and Chaim Soutine, who became a
lifelong friend.
In 1913, Modigliani decided to once again devote himself entirely
to painting. He developed a stylized approach to portraiture that
merged influences from the fourteenth-century Italian primitives,
the academic style of the 19th century, and ethnographic art
with his own unique response to the range of modern movements in
Paris. The direct style of Tête de Jeune Fille
(Louise) (Portrait of a Young Girl La Petite (Louise)),
painted in 1915, is characteristic of this period in Modigliani's
development. The mask-like expression of the face and the long,
thin neck are reminiscent of his earlier sculptures, while the
subtle diagonal slant of the face breaks the rigidity of the
composition. The work takes its name from another, larger portrait
of the same girl. Above her head, in decorative script, is La
Petite Louise, with the word Montmartre at lower
left. This was probably a waitress from one of the many cafés
frequented by the artist. This work is one of the more than 200
portraits that Modigliani painted between 1914 and his death in
1920. He not only worked with professional models but also painted
his mistresses, art dealers, friends, and fellow artists, producing
at least four portraits of Chaim Soutine.
Modigliani did not achieve much commercial success during his
lifetime. His first solo exhibition in Paris was not until 1917,
and the nudes that he displayed there created a scandal. By then
his health was deteriorating, and in January 1920, Amedeo
Modigliani died of complications resulting from tuberculosis.
