Modigliani

Publishers Weekly

In this personality-driven new biography, Meyers (Katherine Mansfield; Hemingway; D.H. Lawrence; etc.) turns his discerning eye to an artist whose "painting thrived on chaos," the French-Italian-Jewish bohemian Amedeo Modigliani. A contemporary of Picasso who detested cubism, "Modi," as he was known to his friends, was stricken with tuberculosis at 16. And while the incurable lung disease eventually led to his death at age 35, his rowdy and reckless lifestyle-replete with women, drugs and drink-surely contributed as well. Modigliani's tumultuous behavior, Meyers posits, was inextricably tied to his work. Meyers presents clear readings of Modigliani's paintings and sculptures, spelling out the influence of art nouveau, Lautrec, stylized African sculpture and mannerism on the artist's flat, vividly colored style. He also knowledgeably traces Modi's self-destructive rise from philosophy-reading child to posthumous star. Though Meyers tends to lapse into lengthy mini-biographies every time a new acquaintance of the artist's is introduced (an interlude about Modigliani's ex-lover Beatrice Hastings, for example, segues into a discussion of Hastings's ex-lover Katherine Mansfield) and frequently repeats his thesis (Modigliani was self-destructive!), he has painted a vibrant portrait of a deeply unhappy man. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In 1920, on the apparent eve of success, Italian expressionist painter and sculptor Amadeo Modigliani, a.k.a. "Modi," died at the age of 35 of tuberculosis aggravated by years of hashish and alcohol use and poverty. The value of his paintings skyrocketed from 150 to 500,000 francs within a decade and kept climbing. Meyers's (Somerset Maugham: A Life) account of Modi's life starts brightly with the artist's birth in Livorno, Italy. But after a move to Paris in 1906, his illness and dissipation catapulted him from handsome, petite, and gentlemanly Jew to wasted and broken wreck. His many acquaintances included fellow painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso, muralist Diego Rivera, poet Max Jacob, painter Chaim Soutine, and writer Katherine Mansfield. Toward the end, he even met Pierre-August Renoir, then in his seventies and bent with rheumatism, and spoke critically and perhaps jealously to the famous old artist. Many Modiglia-ni books have been published, among them Modigliani: Beyond the Myth, a fine catalog for a 2004 exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York that contains color plates and scholarly considerations of the painter's work and world. As a rather sordid mixture of gossip and artistic assertions, this new book is a poor comparison.-Ilene Skeen, Hunter Coll., New York Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

It shouldn't be possible to write a dull life of Amedeo Modigliani, but Meyers (Impressionist Quartet, 2005) manages the task. The most cursed of the artists maudit who crowded bohemian Paris in the early-20th century, Modigliani burned his candle at both ends and in the middle to boot, dying in obscure poverty only a few years before collectors discovered his work. Among his peers, Modi's vast talent was legendary, as was his charismatic personality and his striking physical beauty. But in the age of Cubism and abstraction, he dedicated himself to the sensuous, figurative painting evident in his renowned series of erotic nudes and couldn't help but be overshadowed by his friend and rival Picasso. Though Modigliani never received the recognition he craved, he lived a brief life of extraordinary abandon. A devotee of Nietzsche and of Lautreamont, and a gifted poet himself, this pampered son from a family of bourgeois Italian Jews became the most terrible of Paris's enfants terribles. Even in a community notorious for its excesses, Modi stood out for the wretched intensity of his drinking and drug use and for the grand passion of his many unhappy love affairs. By the age of 35, he was dead of tuberculosis. Unfortunately for Meyers, Modigliani left almost no letters or diaries behind, and the only written records that survive come from heavily poeticized tributes written after his death. Lacking the material to construct a distinctive portrait, Meyers seeks to render Modigliani by invoking strained comparisons to other men he may have resembled. ("Though the two artists never met, the tragic career of . . . French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Breszka . . . illuminates Modi's character.")Thisnarrative is taken over by doubtful speculations and by a faithful, but wearying catalogue of an oeuvre renowned for its lack of variety.