Modigliani’s Muse

‘Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice.’

Jeanne Hebuterne, described as gentle, shy, quiet and delicate, was introduced to to the artistic community in Montparnasse by her brother Andre. There she met charismatic Amedeo Modigliani in spring of 1917. The two had an affair and they soon fell deeply in love. Despite the strong objection from her parents, she soon moved in with him and they got married.

As a beautiful young lady fit for Modigliani’s ideal of beauty, Jeanne instantly became the principal subject for Modigliani’s art. The portrait you see above is the portrait of Jeanne, painted in 1918, just two years prior to Amedeo’s death. Well known for his nudes and paintings of elongated faces, Modigliani was stubborn in not letting his art be labeled as Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism or Futurism, though he worked in a fertile period of ‘isms’. He insisted upon being an individual artist for himself, and his art indeed had its own direction. his nudes, influenced by the Italian Renaissance, were sensual, with elongated features but also quite objective. They were simultaneously abstracted and erotically detailed at the same time.

His portraits are simple, at first glance, but they have an appealing depth to it. I’ll take a portrait of Jeanne for example; that elongated face, full lips, dark eyes full of liveliness that gaze, not at he viewer, but into the distance, softness of her hair that falls on the shoulders, rosy cheeks. Her eyes seem so dark, thoughtful and dreamy but her gaze is full of unbearable sadness, sadness that is realistic, perhaps the sadness caused by the cruel realty which she cannot escape from. Melancholic spirit captivates all his portraits and nudes. Long-faced, sad beauties,that gaze thoughtfully at their dreary and lonely surrounding. Their gaze is not direct, they’re not asking the audience to rescue them from their sad worlds, quite the opposite, they seem to be an inherent part of that world, trapped in it for eternity.

Jeanne Hebuterne in Red Shawl

Portrait of a Young Woman

Seated Nude

Dedie Hayden

Nude Sitting on a Divan

Modigliani died in 1920, aged thirty five, from consumption he masked with alcohol for many years. His epitaph read ‘Struck down by Death at the moment of glory’. Amedeo was a charismatic man who attracted the attention of females. Actually, many of his painting are now lost due to giving them to his girlfriends of the time. With only one solo exhibition held in 1917, which caused a lot of controversy among Parisians, Modigliani, who never longed his work to be regarded as avant-garde, became the epitome of the tragic artist and a posthumous legend of him was created.

Modigliani was an artist who created and painted not in an attempt to shock the audience or outrage, but to say ‘This is what I see.’