Amedeo Modigliani
(Frances Alexander, Jack Michael
)
Modigliani (1884 - 1920) was best known for his portraits of women and his nudes: elongated necks, almond shaped eyes, and a serene facial expression. Few artists created works of such classical beauty as he did. His nudes are painted with a timeless consideration for balance and composition and a superb handling of color. Most of his life as an artist, he lived among the avant-garde or Montparnasse group in Paris and was a member of the Bohemian circle that included such artists as Picasso, Brancusi, Juan Gris, and Utrillo
Amedeo Modigliani: Protraits and Nudes
(Anette Kruszynski
)
The author provides a sympathetic interpretation of Modigliani's career. She charts the artist's development from the penetrating psychological studies of his early portraits, through images of a more decorative nature - the graceful figures with the famous almond-shaped eyes and swan-like necks - to his mature depictions of nudes, which remain valid icons of femininity.
Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art
(Dan Franck, Cynthia Liebow (Translator)
)
Paris is a mythical city, a capital of the arts synonymous with some of the most legendary events in world culture. This reputation has never been so richly deserved as at the beginning of the twentieth century, when fauvism, cubism, dadaism, and surrealism were born in a heady atmosphere that gave way to the modern sensibility. In Bohemian Paris, Dan Franck leads us on a magical exploration of the city and its hotbeds of artistic creation. He introduces erudite and eros-obsessed poet Guillaume Apollinaire; the painter Amedeo Modigliani, generous to a fault even when starving; the opportunistic but brilliant Jean Cocteau; rival geniuses Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. We encounter American writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and form-breaking modern writer and salonist nonpareil Gertrude Stein. Painters and writers, sculptors and poets, they lived like characters in a Balzac story, working, loving, and struggling against a backdrop of extravagant parties and dire poverty. With a novelist's verve and a historian's skill, Dan Franck paints this remarkable time, capturing the beauty and vitality distilled from these artists' lives, which became the cornerstones of great art.
