There are 130 paintings, drawings and sculptures from large museums and private collections that at the Albertina in Vienna tell in depth until 9 January not only the creative parable of Amedeo Modigliani from the first works as a sculptor to the last pictorial production phase, but also the Parisian context in which he operated.
Arriving in Paris in 1906 with the desire to devote himself to sculpture, Modigliani shared with Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi and André Derain an anti-academic passion for extra-European art. An influence on the Livorno artist and his contemporaries, which the curator Marc Restellini, a Modigliani scholar and author of the new catalog raisonné to be released in 2022, eloquently and strongly emphasizes at the beginning of the exhibition, placing one next to the other , Congolese caryatids and similar creations by Picasso and Modigliani, but also Cycladic statuettes and Khmer heads juxtaposed to a large series of drawings, paintings and sculptures by the artist, made especially before the Great War.
Primitivism
The intent is to affirm «the contribution, the imprint and the aesthetic approach of primitivism» underlying Modì’s production, which Restellini also highlights in the title of the exhibition: “Modigliani. The revolution of primitivism “. A radical formal reduction to essentiality, which the talented Italian (“one of the greatest geniuses of modernism”, as the director of the Albertina Klaus Albrecht Schröder defined him) was able to observe at the Louvre and at the ethnographic museum in Paris and to which he remained faithful until his early death at the age of 35, after a life marked by tuberculosis, the consumption of alcohol and drugs and a dramatic shortage of resources.
Sculpture
In 1914 the precarious health conditions forced him to abandon the sculpture. He will therefore turn exclusively to painting and among other things will be born the female nudes that today have contributed to making him one of the most popular artists of the twentieth century. But then, when in the unbridled and licentious Parisian Belle Epoque he exhibited them for the first time at the Berthe Weill gallery at the end of 1917, the exhibition became a scandal because of those nudity so sensual and outrageously shaded by pubic hair. From then on he also portrayed the beloved companion of his last part of life, Jeanne Hébuterne, who committed suicide shortly after her death from tuberculous meningitis. A muse and model whose portraits are on display, mixed with paintings of unknown models and male faces, including those of artist friends Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob, Chaim Soutine.
Modigliani. The revolution of primitivism, Albertina, Vienna, until 9 January