Shortly after his death from tuberculosis in 1920, at the age of thirty-five, the circumstances of Amedeo Modigliani's brief and tumultuous life became embroidered by myth and legend. He grew up in Livorno, Italy, one of four children of a cultivated, once prosperous Jewish merchant family. To ease financial matters, his enterprising mother and her sister, a literary critic, opened an experimental school for precocious children, teaching them philosophy and literature. The intellectual and literary fervor at home influenced the young Modigliani, a beautiful and sensitive child, who, it is said, read Lautréamont, Nietzsche, Wilde, Verlaine, and Henri-Louis Bergson, and, when he was older, could recite whole pages from Dante's *Divine Comedy*.

Modigliani's life was overshadowed by illness. At the age of fourteen, he suffered from a bout of pleurisy that ended his formal schooling. In 1901, he contracted a typhoid infection, followed by tuberculosis—from which he would never recover. Between 1902 and 1906, Modigliani visited Capri, Naples, Florence, Venice, and Rome. The actual beginnings of his career as an artist coincided with his arrival in Paris in the winter of 1906, with a small allowance from his family, which he continued to receive until the outbreak of World War I. In the remaining fourteen years of his life, he would produce an oeuvre comprising some 420 paintings—of which only about fourteen are dated—and innumerable drawings.

Except for four landscapes painted in 1919 in the south of France, his main subject matter consisted of portraits. Between 1917 and 1919, Modigliani also produced about twenty-five nudes—paintings whose eroticism, although stylized, is frankly sensuous. His early portraits (1906-1909) reflect the influence of Edvard Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the Picasso of the Blue Period, after which Modigliani fell under the spell of Cézanne. By 1916, he had found his own style, which James Thrall Soby aptly called one of elegant "mannerist elongation." This particular mode of reducing the features of his sitters to their essentials was largely provoked by Modigliani's previous activity as a sculptor, from 1906 to 1915—a period when he hardly painted at all. Dr. Paul Alexandre, his first patron and collector, had introduced the artist to the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi in 1909. During the following years, with Brancusi acting as his teacher and mentor when they were neighbors in the Cité Falguière, Modigliani produced twenty-nine monumental sculpted heads (twenty-eight in stone and one in wood) and two full figures. Carved directly into the stone, the archaistic, stylized features of these heads derived from non-European art and, of course, from that of Brancusi.

The onset of World War I, however, resulted in the closing of most of the building sites in Paris where the artist found his materials. The difficulty in obtaining stone, along with respiratory problems brought on by dust, made Modigliani give up sculpture. Many consider his carved totemic, strangely androgynous smiling heads as his most original contribution to the art of this century. However, while these were imaginary, his painted portraits were always from the model, and usually finished in a single sitting. Modigliani was also a consummate draftsman and, throughout his stay in Paris, attended sketching classes.

It is a tribute to the artist's insight into human nature that, with just a few telling details, often of an ironic or satirical nature, he was able to achieve a striking likeness. This quality, as noted by John Russell, is most pronounced in Modigliani's portraits of men, among them, the artists and writers Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, Juan Gris, Chaim Soutine, and Jacques Lipchitz, and also the dealers Paul Guillaume and Leopold Zborowski.

By 1918, Modigliani's style had become more fluid and graceful, and his palette had lightened—as can be seen in this painting of a seemingly shoulderless young boy somewhere between thirteen and fifteen years of age. As in most of Modigliani's close-up or half-length portraits, there is little indication of the surroundings. Usually, a blank wall or, as here, a paneled door were the artist's favorite backgrounds. Modigliani represents the boy's body at a slight angle, to which he aligns the direction of the nose and upper lip. It gives the sitter a somewhat sardonic and even tough look, rather surprising in someone that young. The boy's ill-fitting dark-blue suit, blue-and-white striped sweater worn over a dark shirt, and his wide cummerbund resemble the uniform of a restaurant or hotel busboy or porter. From March 1918 until May 1919, Modigliani and Jeanne Hébuterne (1898-1920), his mistress and the mother of his child, lived in the south of France—mainly in Nice—because of the artist's seriously deteriorating health. Lacking his usual coterie of friends, Modigliani employed local young servants, shopgirls, and children as his models.

Inscription: Signed (upper right): modigliani  

Credit Line: Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998

Accession Number: 1999.363.56 

Provenance:

[Paul Guillaume, Paris, by 1931–d. 1934; inv. no. 750]; private collection, Paris (in 1950); [Sam Salz, New York, 1952; sold on April 2, 1952, for $27,000, to Gelman]; Jacques and Natasha Gelman, Mexico City and New York (1952–his d. 1986); Natasha Gelman, Mexico City and New York (1986–d. 1998; her bequest to MMA)