There are only a few short days left before the Amedeo Modigliani exhibit comes down at The Phillips Collection museum in Washington D.C. If you are not familiar with Modigliani by name then you may be familiar with his famous elongated faces. Some of my favorites are his reclining nudes, which I find to be some of the most beautiful of that variety. This was an exhibit that was put together by The Jewish Museum in Brooklyn, and it was about time a Modigliani exhibit was put together again. I only wish I had been able to see it.
Here is a blurb from The Jewish Museum's website:
" When Modigliani died in Paris in 1920, at the age of thirty-five, he became the standard-bearer for the myth of the bohemian artist — the unappreciated “artist-genius” consoled by wine and drugs. This celebrated myth is based on details of the artist’s colorful life. As captivating as such biography may be, it does little to further our understanding of the man or his art. The story of Modigliani’s life has eclipsed his work, severing it from the ideas and cultural traditions that might otherwise reveal its many meanings. Such mythmaking has made one of the best-known early modernist artists one of the most misunderstood."The Jewish Museum presents the first major exhibition of Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) in New York since his 1951 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art. An anomaly among the many foreign Jewish artists who lived in Paris during the early 1900s, Modigliani remained independent of any movement or style, and was known primarily for his reclining nudes and portraits with elegantly elongated features. Modigliani: Beyond the Myth shows the full range of the artist's oeuvre — painting, drawing and sculpture — in an effort to reevaluate his position within the development of twentieth-century European modernism."
Posted by Paul Hina at May 25, 2005 10:49 PM