An insightful, myth-busting biography of early 20th-century Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, seen through the lenses of the artist’s tuberculosis and other ailments. Becoming Modigliani is a comprehensive biography that delves into the troubled life of the Jewish-Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. Written by Dr. Henri Colt, an internationally recognized lung specialist, the book examines the artist's legend and Modigliani's creative journey from a medical perspective, from his birth in Livorno, Italy, to his tragic death in a paupers' hospital in Paris at the age of thirty-five, presumably from tuberculous meningitis. Becoming Modigliani sheds light on the young man's chronic illnesses, addictions, and relationships with friends and lovers as he navigated the vibrant yet challenging world of early twentieth-century Bohemian Paris. Beginning with "Modi's" birth in 1884, the narrative is divided into five parts, seamlessly blending biographical elements with medical insights and a critical analysis of Modigliani's work among some of the greatest artists of the time. It also provides thoughtful descriptions of a changing society governed by the impact of infectious diseases, war, and a flourishing of other creative geniuses such as Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Guillaume Apollinaire. With thirty-seven virtually standalone chapters, a preface and epilogue, three appendices, and a rich array of illustrations and references, this biography promises a profound and compassionate exploration of Modigliani's embattled world. In Becoming Modigliani, Dr. Colt's aim is to foster empathy and greater understanding by unraveling the intricate layers of Modigliani's existence. The result is a captivating and deeply researched tale that will resonate with a diverse audience of serious readers, art and medical history enthusiasts, sociologists, and anyone interested in the human spirit.

“People like us . . . have different rights, different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” —Modigliani Amedeo (“Beloved of God”) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In Modigliani’s time, his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the new approaches of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. Jean Cocteau called Modigliani “our aristocrat” and said, “There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful. Alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.” In this major new biography, Meryle Secrest, one of our most admired biographers—whose work has been called “enthralling” (The Wall Street Journal); “rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written” (The New York Review of Books) —now gives us a fully realized portrait of one of the twentieth century’s master painters and sculptors: his upbringing, a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished but genteel Italian family; his going to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks (“How beautiful he was, my god how beautiful,” said one of his models) . . . his training as an artist . . .and his influences, including the Italian Renaissance, particularly the art of Botticelli; Nietzsche’s theories of the artist as Übermensch, divinely endowed, divinely inspired; the monochromatic backgrounds of Van Gogh and Cézanne; the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified, masklike triangular faces, elongated silhouettes, puckered lips, low foreheads, and heads on exaggeratedly long necks. We see the ways in which Modigliani’s long-kept-secret illness from tuberculosis (it almost killed him as a young man) affected his work and his attitude toward life ; how consumption caused him to embrace fatalism and idealism, creativity and death; and how he used alcohol and opium with laudanum as an antispasmodic to hide the symptoms of the disease and how, because of it, he came to be seen as a dissolute alcoholic. And throughout, we see the Paris that Modigliani lived in, a city in dynamic flux where art was still a noble cause; how Modigliani became part of a life in the streets and a world of art and artists then in a transforming revolution; Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, et al.—and others more radical—Matisse, Derain, etc., all living within blocks of one another. Secrest’s book, written with unprecedented access to letters, diaries, and photographs never before seen, is an extraordinary revelation of a life lived in art . . . Here is Modigliani, the man and the artist, seemingly shy, delicate, a man on a desperate mission, masquerading as an alcoholic, cheating death again and again, and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however much time remained . . .

The life of the painter Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) was chaotic and tragically brief. Consisting of a series of vignettes, mostly set in the painter's studio and peopled by his lover Jeanne Hébuterne (who ended her own life the day after Modigliani's death), the prostitutes who were his occasional models and several Bohemian visitors, the novel spans the last months of Modigliani's life, evoking the strange workings of the painter's troubled and often drug-fuelled mind and its expression in his paintings, ultimately succeeding in conveying something of the intense artistic life of Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Recounts the brief life and career of the Italian painter, with a detailed anaylsis of his religious drawings, nudes, and portraits

An illuminating study of Amedeo Modigliani's early drawings and how they reflect the artist's conception of identity One of the great artists of the 20th century, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is celebrated for revolutionizing modern portraiture, particularly in his later paintings and sculpture. Modigliani Unmasked examines the artist's rarely seen early works on paper, offering revelatory insights into his artistic sensibilities and concerns as he developed his signature style of graceful, elongated figures. An Italian Sephardic Jew working in turn-of-the-century Paris, Modigliani embraced his status as an outsider, and his early drawings show a marked awareness of the role of ethnicity and race within society. Placing these drawings within the context of the artist's larger oeuvre, Mason Klein reveals how Modigliani's preoccupation with identity spurred the artist to reconceive the modern portrait, arguing that Modigliani ultimately came to think of identity as beyond national or cultural boundaries. Lavishly illustrated with the artist's paintings and over one hundred drawings collected by Dr. Paul Alexandre, Modigliani's close friend and first patron, this book provides an engaging and long overdue analysis of Modigliani's early body of work on paper.

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A high-speed, high-stakes thriller from Ken Follett, the grand master of international action and suspense. A fabulous "lost masterpiece" becomes the ultimate prize—for an art historian whose ambition consumes everyone around her, an angry young painter with a plan for revenge on the art establishment, and a desperate gallery owner who may have double-crossed his own life away. Behind the elegance and glamour of the art world, anything goes—theft, forgery, betrayal, and maybe even murder. . . .