LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.- In the first decades of the twentieth century, Paris was alive with the spirit of the avant-garde as artists Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Chaïm Soutine, and others were at the center of an exciting new movement in art. Into this world stepped 22-year-old Amedeo Modigliani.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) revisits this momentous time in Modigliani & the Artists of Montparnasse. The exhibition (June 29 through September 28, 2003) celebrates the brief yet influential career of the Italian-born artist and the extraordinary international circle of fellow artists, critics, dealers, collectors, writers, and musicians who gathered in the Paris neighborhood of Montparnasse during the early years of the twentieth century.

The first major Modigliani exhibition in the United States in more than 40 years, Modigliani & the Artists of Montparnasse features approximately 50 paintings, sculptures, and drawings by Modigliani as well as works by his Montparnasse contemporaries, including Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Matisse, Soutine, Picasso, Rivera, and others. Pieces in the show come from public and private collections across North America, Europe, and Japan.

Amedeo Modigliani 1884-1920 - Modigliani, influenced by of a wide range of art that encompasses African masks, Cambodian and Egyptian art, medieval sculpture, and the sculpture of Michelangelo as well as Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism, took traditional subjects in the history of art—especially the portrait and the nude—and modernized them. He is best known for his elongated and sensuous portraits of females with soulful, almond-shaped eyes. Modigliani also made a major contribution to modern sculpture, producing approximately two dozen carved stone heads, six of which can be seen in the exhibition. Like the other avant-garde artists of Montparnasse, Modigliani avoided naturalistic depictions in favor of the more imaginative and creative, as can be seen readily in his 1916 canvas Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz.

Modigliani was born in 1884 into a Jewish family in the Italian port town of Livorno. Sickly as a child, he ceased his formal schooling in 1898 and began instead to study art. Further enforced convalescence afforded Modigliani, in 1901, the opportunity to travel throughout his homeland, where he was exposed to Italy’s most important works of art. In subsequent years he took classes at the fine-arts academies in both Florence and Venice. An ambitious and creative artist, Modigliani was caught between his desire to create new art and the strength of the Italian academic heritage; he ultimately resolved the conflict by creating a body of work traditional in subject matter but avant-garde in style.

The Artists of Montparnasse - As part of his effort to expand his cultural horizons, Modigliani moved to Paris in 1906. In his early years there he experimented and struggled to find a personal style. He first settled in the northern Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre, and in late 1908 or early 1909 moved to Montparnasse (a tiny neighborhood just a mile square), where his signature style developed. It also was there that he met the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi; and this relationship stimulated Modigliani’s interest in three-dimensional work. For the next five years he concentrated on sculpture and related drawings.

In 1914 Modigliani met Paul Guillaume, who became his dealer and is the subject of a 1915 Modigliani portrait that appears in the exhibition. Modigliani’s work of this period is highly autobiographical and provides striking evidence of his many contacts with the artistic and literary avant-garde in Paris at that time. In addition to the numerous portraits of his lovers, friends, and colleagues in Montparnasse (including Lipchitz and Guillaume as well as Chaïm Soutine, Jean Cocteau, Paul Alexandre, Max Jacob, and others), Modigliani also painted many poignant portraits of children during these years, giving them a rare nobility and sense of presence.

Modigliani also is known for his paintings of sensuous reclining nudes, many of which were shown at the Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris in December 1917. The exhibition was closed down by the police on grounds of obscenity, despite the fact that these paintings continued the grand tradition of the nude exemplified by such masters as Giorgione, Titian, and Edouard Manet.

Modigliani’s health, never robust, began to deteriorate in 1918. He died two years later, at age 35, of tubercular meningitis aggravated by abuse of drugs and alcohol. Modigliani & the Artists of Montparnasse shows how Modigliani’s art and life epitomize the diverse, multicultural artistic approach that developed in Montparnasse at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This exhibition was organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities and, in part, by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In Los Angeles, the exhibition was made possible by LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Director’s Endowment Fund, Deloitte & Touche and Art of the Palate 2002. The exhibition was designed by Brenda Levin FAIA Levin & Associates, Architects. LACMA Curator: Carol S. Eliel, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, LACMA