Modigliani: Painting Natural Female Beauty in Unusual Shapes

An Artist: painting the Natural Beauty of females.

The library people are very good people. They know the value of the things they are dealing in, the reading stuffs. They also care about the things, in proportion to their respective values; thus the newspapers are kept wide open on a front table, accessible to all those who can read and run away. But they store the books of values on the highest altars of library where only a person with adequate height could have some inroads. Once I had found a nicely bound and rarely opened book from one of those alters. That was a book about paintings of Modigliani; it was my first encounter with an artist of such a big height.

Portrait of Lunia Czechowska by Modigliani

The Artist: The Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani (1884 to 1920) had two things in the fullest intensity: one was the art of painting and another was his poverty. Both played vital roles in his short life and the artistic career. The contemporary painters like Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Rouault, Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso were his favourite and had influenced his art.

The Style: Every artist suffers from one incurable disease: a passion for doing something unique. Modigliani also suffered from the same disease. Artists do put their signatures on paintings. But Modigliani used the whole frame as his signature. You would recognize his paintings at first sight. Deliberate distortion of the figures, large spaces, and the free use of flat areas of colour: these were the characteristics of Modigliani’s paintings. (Image Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Modigliani's Later years

Every artist wold produce his or her best in later years of life. Modigliani, too, did so. He had a wonderful and one of the most beautiful young woman as his model: Jeanne Hebuterne. she was only nineteen years of age when she met him first in 1917. Modigliani had painted her several times. The portrait given here is one of his best paintings done in last years of his life. Jeanne was the model.

Jeanne Hebuterne, by Modigliani

Sometimes an artist, though deserved one, gets fame for wrong reasons. Perhaps it was true in case of Modigliani. Though he painted very beautiful portraits, his fame came from the paintings of females painted wearing no clothes. Modigliani’s females painted in their natural beauties had unusual faces. He had his own technique to paint the figures so flat, giving them the mask like appearance. He painted the female model's eyes mostly in almond shape an nose a bit twisted. In most of his figurative paintings, he painted the stretched out neck of female models. At the end of his his he had returned to Paris. His successful exhibitions in England helped him getting buyers. (Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The Art: Modigliani’s paintings of the females had captivating arrangement of curvy lines and flat planes. He had executed in his female in a striking idealization of feminine flavour.

His occasional brushes with sculpture, due to his friendship with Constantine Brancusi, helped him to infuse in paintings the aspects like strong linear rhythms, simple stretched out forms, and notable verticality.

Jeanne Hebuterne in Large Hat, by Amedeo Modigliani In the cubist style of painting, the artist look at the objects imaging them as geometrical forms, circles, triangles, cylinder, cones and like that. Then the painter transfers the mental images on the canvass with the help of cool or bright colours. (Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)