Amedeo Modigliani

Works from the Musée de Grenoble

A hundred years have only just passed since the death of Amedeo Modigliani who, at just thirty-five, died in Paris with his mind in the grip of delirium, after a short but burning life that was artistically accomplished.

From 30 April to 18 July, the display of six works by Modigliani, made possible by the collaboration with the Musée de Grenoble, allows us to analyse the relationship between drawing and painting and to grasp the main cultural references in his work as a portraitist.

Until 18 July 2021 at the Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Mamiano di Traversetolo, near Parma, are on show the painting Femme au col blanc, oil on canvas of 1917, depicting Lunia Czechowska, his favourite model, wife of the childhood friend of Léopold Zborowski, art dealer and patron of Modigliani, and five pencil portraits of figures from the French capital of the 1910s, where he was at the centre of the artistic scene, at the time at the international avant-garde.

In the painterly poetics of Modigliani (Livorno 1884 – Paris 1920) the portrait is the only possible vehicle for the artist’s creative fury and the vital instrument for expressing his deeply human longing to weave an exchange with other beings. Starting from a deep fascination with the stylistic essentiality of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Sienese tradition, with the plastic qualities of sculpture and with the stylisation of the graphic line, Modigliani develops an absolutely original conception of the portrait, also taking into account the teaching of Paul Cézanne and of African masks. To underline these influences, important examples of Sienese and Cézannian painting are placed alongside Modigliani’s works in the exhibition, as are tribal masks from the Ivory Coast.

The masterpieces of French art from the period in which he lived and worked, belonging to the collections of the Magnani-Rocca Foundation (besides Cézanne, also Renoir, Monet, Matisse and Braque; but also the Italian Severini, who in those years was living in Paris), offer the public a broad view of the artistic scene of the time.

Restless, always poised between genius and dissoluteness, a modern dandy and a refined architect of his own tragic destiny, the perfect stereotype of the artiste maudit (“cursed artist”), Modigliani was, besides a great painter, an excellent draughtsman, managing, with a line at once volumetric and two-dimensional, to capture the sensibility and psychology of his sitters; those who modelled for him used to say that being portrayed by him was like “having your soul stripped bare”. The most characteristic and fascinating trait of Modigliani’s work lies precisely in his introspective talent, which allowed him to bring to expression the most intimate qualities of the person, turning each single portrait into a sort of inner mirror.

Far more famous than the male ones, the female portraits are the greatest examples of Modigliani’s artistic sensibility; the delicate features and the slender, elegant necks have become identifying marks of the painter’s art itself, and the Femme au col blanc is a splendid example. Although he uses a thoroughly modern language, he never forgets the Italian tradition; the female ideal with the long neck had in fact been dreamed of and painted by other great artists of the past, Parmigianino above all, with his Madonna with the Long Neck, painted in Parma itself between 1534 and 1540.

But your visit does not end here… keep reading: The Villa dei Capolavori The Romantic Park

On the cover: Amedeo Modigliani, Femme au col blanc, 1917, oil on canvas. (Detail)