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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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Rock Me, Amedeo
Amedeo Modigliani’s life was straight out of La Bohéme. Born to a bourgeois Jewish family in Italy, he moved to Paris in 1906 in time to catch the tidal wave of modernism that would sweep the art world. He embraced the new ideas but never fit in with any particular school, so his art remained poorly appreciated through his life. His financial poverty was alleviated by his association with artists and intellectuals, but eventually his poor health caught up with him, and he died in 1920 at age 36.
As with many artists, Modigliani’s personal life has threatened to overwhelm his work, but the Kimbell Art Museum’s latest exhibit, Modigliani and the Artists of Montparnasse, intends to rectify that. The show, organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, gathers some 60 of his works. In it, we can see how his early efforts in sculpture, influenced by Egyptian, pre-classical Greek, and African sculpture, eventually gave way to painting in the same style. His portraits are instantly recognizable as his, with their elongated faces and often pupil-less eyes. Yet even though the portraits are all done in the same highly nonrealistic style, the individual personalities of the subjects come through with such clarity that each piece is unique. Contemporaries such as Chaim Soutine and Jacques Lipchitz get their corner of the exhibit, too, but the perspective only shows that Modigliani was as much an anomaly in his own time as he is in ours.
Modigliani and the Artists of Montparnasse runs Feb 9-May 25 at Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd, FW. Admission is $5-10. Call 817-332-8451.
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