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Soundtrack:Taeko Onuki & Ryuichi Sakamoto-Bibo no Aozora

 

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Machapuchare towers over the tropical Modi Khola valley in Central Nepal, en route to Annapurna basecamp.

 

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Modi Khola river in the Deurali valley being snowed in

Sovabajar, Kolkata, India

SN/NC: Solanum lycopersicum, Solanaceae Family

 

This beautiful plant or vegetable commonly known as a tomato plant, which belongs to the nightshade family, Solanaceae. The species originated in Central and South America. The Nahuatl (Aztec language) word tomatl gave rise to the Spanish word "tomate", from which the English word tomato originates.

Numerous varieties of tomato are widely grown in temperate climates across the world, with greenhouses allowing its production throughout the year and in cooler areas. The plants typically grow to 1–3 meters (3–10 ft) in height and have a weak stem that often sprawls over the ground and vines over other plants. It is a perennial in its native habitat, and grown as an annual in temperate climates. An average common tomato weighs approximately 100 grams (4 oz). Its use as a food originated in Mexico, and spread throughout the world following the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Tomato is consumed in diverse ways, including raw, as an ingredient in many dishes, sauces, salads, and drinks. While tomatoes are botanically berry-type fruits, they are considered culinary vegetables, being ingredients of savory meals.

 

Es conocido comúnmente como tomate, tomatera o jitomate, es una especie de planta herbácea del género Solanum de la familia Solanaceae; es nativa de Centro y Sudamérica y su uso como comida se habría originado en México hace unos 2500 años. El nombre proviene de la palabra náhuatl tomatl.

Es cultivada en el mundo entero para su consumo tanto fresco como procesado de diferentes modos (salsa, puré, zumo, deshidratado, enlatado).

 

O tradicional tomate, cultivado no mundo inteiro, originário da América Central e consagrado na Europa pelos italianos em suas deliciosas pastas. Para alguns é um vegetal e outros chegam a dizer que é fruta. Mas acho mesmo que é um legume e pouco importa o título. O que vale mesmo é sua importancia para a culinaria mundial.

 

Het is algemeen bekend als tomaat, tomaat of tomaat, het is een soort kruidachtige plant van het geslacht Solanum van de Solanaceae-familie; Het komt oorspronkelijk uit Midden- en Zuid-Amerika en het gebruik ervan als voedsel zou ongeveer 2500 jaar geleden in Mexico zijn ontstaan. De naam komt van het Nahuatl-woord tomatl.

Het wordt over de hele wereld gekweekt voor consumptie, zowel vers als op verschillende manieren verwerkt (saus, puree, sap, gedehydrateerd, ingeblikt).

 

È comunemente noto come pomodoro, pomodoro o pomodoro, è una specie di pianta erbacea del genere Solanum della famiglia delle Solanacee; È originario dell'America centrale e meridionale e si dice che il suo uso come cibo abbia avuto origine in Messico circa 2.500 anni fa. Il nome deriva dalla parola Nahuatl tomatl.

Viene coltivato in tutto il mondo per il consumo, sia fresco che lavorato in vari modi (salsa, purea, succo, disidratato, in scatola).

 

Es ist allgemein bekannt als Tomate, Tomate oder Tomate, es ist eine Art krautige Pflanze der Gattung Solanum der Familie Solanaceae; Sie ist in Mittel- und Südamerika beheimatet und ihre Verwendung als Nahrungsmittel soll vor etwa 2.500 Jahren in Mexiko entstanden sein. Der Name leitet sich vom Nahuatl-Wort tomatl ab.

Es wird auf der ganzen Welt für den Verzehr angebaut, sowohl frisch als auch auf verschiedene Weise verarbeitet (Sauce, Püree, Saft, dehydriert, in Dosen).

 

Elle est communément appelée tomate, tomate ou tomate, c'est une sorte de plante herbacée du genre Solanum de la famille des Solanacées ; Il est originaire d'Amérique centrale et d'Amérique du Sud et son utilisation comme aliment serait originaire du Mexique il y a environ 2 500 ans. Le nom vient du mot nahuatl tomatl.

Il est cultivé partout dans le monde pour la consommation, aussi bien frais que transformé de diverses manières (sauce, purée, jus, déshydraté, en conserve).

 

يُعرف باسم الطماطم أو الطماطم أو الطماطم ، وهو نوع من النباتات العشبية من جنس Solanum من عائلة Solanaceae ؛ موطنها الأصلي أمريكا الوسطى والجنوبية ويقال أن استخدامها كغذاء قد نشأ في المكسيك منذ حوالي 2500 عام. يأتي الاسم من كلمة ناهواتل توماتل.

يزرع في جميع أنحاء العالم للاستهلاك ، طازجًا ومعالجًا بطرق مختلفة (الصلصة ، المهروس ، العصير ، المجفف ، المعلب).

 

一般にトマト、トマト、またはトマトと呼ばれ、ナス科ナス属の草本植物の一種です。中南米原産で、食用としての利用は約2,500年前にメキシコで始まったと考えられています。名前はナワトル語のトマトルに由来します。

生のものもあれば、さまざまな方法で加工されたもの(ソース、ピューレ、ジュース、乾燥、缶詰)も含めて、世界中で消費用に栽培されています。

✅ARABIC TATTOO'S STUDIO PRESENTS

 

HAPPY HALLOWEEN TATTOO

 

COMES WITH A DRESS AND BODY TATTOO AND FACE TATTOO

 

✔ STORE LM:

maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Lycaena%20Island/192/57/22

The museum presents the story of Modiin from the time of the Hasmonean Family till the establishment of the modern city.

Many archeological artifacts have been found in the Modi'in area, revealing its rich and glorious historical past.

Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) - Le jeune apprenti [The young apprentice] (1918-1919). In the Walter-Guillaume Collection at the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris.

Modi'in is an Israeli city located in central Israel, about 30 kilometres west of Jerusalem. The population about 100 thousend.

Modi'in, Israel 2014

This spectacular “blue marble” image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. These images are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the public. This record includes preview images and links to full resolution versions up to 21,600 pixels across.

 

Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device-NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth onboard the Terra satellite, MODIS provides an integrated tool for observing a variety of terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric features of the Earth. The land and coastal ocean portions of these images are based on surface observations collected from June through September 2001 and combined, or composited, every eight days to compensate for clouds that might block the sensor’s view of the surface on any single day. Two different types of ocean data were used in these images: shallow water true color data, and global ocean color (or chlorophyll) data. Topographic shading is based on the GTOPO 30 elevation dataset compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey’s EROS Data Center. MODIS observations of polar sea ice were combined with observations of Antarctica made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s AVHRR sensor—the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer. The cloud image is a composite of two days of imagery collected in visible light wavelengths and a third day of thermal infra-red imagery over the poles. Global city lights, derived from 9 months of observations from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, are superimposed on a darkened land surface map.

 

For more information related to NASA's Blue Marble go to:

 

earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BlueMarble/BlueMarble_...

 

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.

 

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To view an animation of this image go here:www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/4401845574/

 

For another view go here:www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/4386822005/

 

Credit NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli (land surface, shallow water, clouds). Enhancements by Robert Simmon (ocean color, compositing, 3D globes, animation). Data and technical support: MODIS Land Group; MODIS Science Data Support Team; MODIS Atmosphere Group; MODIS Ocean Group Additional data: USGS EROS Data Center (topography); USGS Terrestrial Remote Sensing Flagstaff Field Center (Antarctica); Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (city lights).

Trekking in the Annapurna's, Chhomrong, Nepal (1993)

Day - 5

Statue of Unity

 

The Statue of Unity is a colossal statue of Indian statesman and independence activist Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1875–1950), who was the first Deputy Prime Minister and Home minister of independent India and adherent of Mahatma Gandhi during the non-violent Indian Independence movement. Patel was highly respected for his leadership in uniting 562 princely states of India with a major part of the former British Raj to form the single Union of India. The statue is located in the state of Gujarat, India. It is the world's tallest statue with a height of 182 metres (597 feet). It is located on the Narmada River in the Kevadiya colony, facing the Sardar Sarovar Dam 100 kilometres (62 mi) southeast of the city of Vadodara and 150 kilometres (93 mi) from Surat.

 

The project was first announced in 2010 and the construction of the statue started in October 2013 by Larsen & Toubro, with a total construction cost of ₹2,989 crore (₹29.89 billion; US$437 million). It was designed by Indian sculptor Ram V. Sutar, and was inaugurated by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 31 October 2018, the 143rd anniversary of Sardar Patel's birth. (Source - Wikipedia)

Modi'in is an Israeli city located in central Israel, about 30 kilometres west of Jerusalem. The population about 100 thousend.

Afternoon clouds coming in.Taken from MBC. Machhapuchare Base Camp

Modi'in is an Israeli city located in central Israel, about 30 kilometres west of Jerusalem. The population about 100 thousend.

One of the highlights at Dublin in 2015, Air India 747-400 VT-ESO as "Air India One " with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on board, on a very brief half day state visit to Ireland.

 

Originating in New Dehli via Dublin enroute to the United Nations, it was a real treat as Air India does not serve Dublin nor does the 747 these days either.

 

Both arrival & departure during daylight hours & tipped off well in advance ensured everybody got their photos & really was an " Indian summer ".

 

Delivered to Air India in December 1993 & named Khajuraho.

Amedeo Modigliani

Italian, 1884 - 1920

Woman with a Necklace, 1917

Oil on canvas

 

(closeup)

 

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (July 12, 1884 – January 24, 1920) was a Jewish-Italian painter and sculptor who pursued his career for the most part in France. Modigliani was born in Livorno, Italy and began his artistic studies in Italy before moving to Paris in 1906. Influenced by the artists in his circle of friends and associates, by a range of genres and movements, and by primitive art, Modigliani's oeuvre was nonetheless unique and idiosyncratic. He died in Paris of tubercular meningitis—exacerbated by a lifestyle of excess—at the age of 35.

 

Early life

 

Modigliani was born into a Jewish family in Livorno, Italy.

 

Livorno was still a relatively new city, by Italian standards, in the late nineteenth century. The city on the Tyrrhenian coast dates from around 1600, when it was transformed from a swampy village into a seaport. The Livorno that Modigliani knew was a bustling centre of commerce focused upon seafaring and shipwrighting, but its cultural history lay in being a refuge for those persecuted for their religion. His own maternal great-great-grandfather was one Solomon Garsin, a Jew who had immigrated to Livorno in the eighteenth century as a religious refugee.

 

Modigliani was the fourth child of Flaminio Modigliani and his wife, Eugenia Garsin. His father was in the money-changing business, but when the business went bankrupt, the family lived in dire poverty. In fact, Amedeo's birth saved the family from certain ruin, as, according to an ancient law, creditors could not seize the bed of a pregnant woman or a mother with a newborn child. When bailiffs entered the family home, just as Eugenia went into labour, the family protected their most valuable assets by piling them on top of the expectant mother.

 

Modigliani had a particularly close relationship with his mother, who taught her son at home until he was ten. Beset with health problems after a bout of typhoid at the age of fourteen, two years later he contracted the tuberculosis which would affect him for the rest of his life. To help him recover from his many childhood illnesses, she took him to Naples in Southern Italy, where the warmer weather was conducive to his convalescence.

 

His mother was, in many ways, instrumental in his ability to pursue art as a vocation. When he was eleven years of age, she had noted in her diary that:

 

“The child's character is still so unformed that I cannot say what I think of it. He behaves like a spoiled child, but he does not lack intelligence. We shall have to wait and see what is inside this chrysalis. Perhaps an artist?"

 

Art student years

 

Modigliani is known to have drawn and painted from a very early age, and thought himself "already a painter", his mother wrote, even before beginning formal studies. Despite her misgivings that launching him on a course of studying art would impinge upon his other studies, his mother indulged the young Modigliani's passion for the subject.

 

At the age of fourteen, while sick with the typhoid fever, he raved in his delirium that he wanted, above all else, to see the paintings in the Palazzo Pitti and the Uffizi in Florence. As Livorno's local museum only housed a sparse few paintings by the Italian Renaissance masters, the tales he had heard about the great works held in Florence intrigued him, and it was a source of considerable despair to him, in his sickened state, that he might never get the chance to view them in person. His mother promised that she would take him to Florence herself, the moment he was recovered. Not only did she fulfil this promise, but she also undertook to enroll him with the best painting master in Livorno, Guglielmo Micheli.

 

Micheli and the Macchiaioli

 

Modigliani worked in the studio of Micheli from 1898 to 1900. Here his earliest formal artistic instruction took place in an atmosphere deeply steeped in a study of the styles and themes of nineteenth-century Italian art. In his earliest Parisian work, traces of this influence, and that of his studies of Renaissance art, can still be seen: artists such as Giovanni Boldini figure just as much in this nascent work as do those of Toulouse-Lautrec.

 

Modigliani showed great promise while with Micheli, and only ceased his studies when he was forced to, by the onset of tuberculosis.

 

In 1901, whilst in Rome, Modigliani admired the work of Domenico Morelli, a painter of melodramatic Biblical studies and scenes from great literature. It is ironic that he should be so struck by Morelli, as this painter had served as an inspiration for a group of iconoclasts who went by the title, the Macchiaioli (from macchia—"dash of colour", or, more derogatively, "stain"), and Modigliani had already been exposed to the influences of the Macchiaioli. This minor, localised art movement was possessed of a need to react against the bourgeois stylings of the academic genre painters. While sympathetically connected to (and actually pre-dating) the French Impressionists, the Macchiaioli did not make the same impact upon international art culture as did the followers of Monet, and are today largely forgotten outside of Italy.

 

Modigliani's connection with the movement was through Micheli, his first art teacher. Micheli was not only a Macchiaioli himself, but had been a pupil of the famous Giovanni Fattori, a founder of the movement. Micheli's work, however, was so fashionable and the genre so commonplace that the young Modigliani reacted against it, preferring to ignore the obsession with landscape that, as with French Impressionism, characterised the movement. Micheli also tried to encourage his pupils to paint en plein air, but Modigliani never really got a taste for this style of working, sketching in cafes, but preferring to paint indoors, and especially in his own studio. Even when compelled to paint landscapes (three are known to exist), Modigliani chose a proto-Cubist palette more akin to Cézanne than to the Macchiaioli.

 

While with Micheli, Modigliani not only studied landscape, but also portraiture, still-life, and the nude. His fellow students recall that the latter was where he displayed his greatest talent, and apparently this was not an entirely academic pursuit for the teenager: when not painting nudes, he was occupied with seducing the household maid.

 

Despite his rejection of the Macchiaioli approach, Modigliani nonetheless found favour with his teacher, who referred to him as "Superman", a pet name reflecting the fact that Modigliani was not only quite adept at his art, but also that he regularly quoted from Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. Fattori himself would often visit the studio, and approved of the young artist's innovations.

 

In 1902, Modigliani continued what was to be a life-long infatuation with life drawing, enrolling in the Accademia di Belle Arti (Scuola Libera di Nudo, or "Free School of Nude Studies") in Florence. A year later while still suffering from tuberculosis, he moved to Venice, where he registered to study at the Istituto di Belle Arti.

 

It is in Venice that he first smoked hashish and, rather than studying, began to spend time frequenting disreputable parts of the city. The impact of these lifestyle choices upon his developing artistic style is open to conjecture, although these choices do seem to be more than simple teenage rebellion, or the cliched hedonism and bohemianism that was almost expected of artists of the time; his pursuit of the seedier side of life appears to have roots in his appreciation of radical philosophies, such as those of Nietzsche.

 

Early literary influences

 

Having been exposed to erudite philosophical literature as a young boy under the tutelage of Isaco Garsin, his maternal grandfather, he continued to read and be influenced through his art studies by the writings of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Carduzzi, Comte de Lautréamont, and others, and developed the belief that the only route to true creativity was through defiance and disorder.

 

Letters that he wrote from his 'sabbatical' in Capri in 1901 clearly indicate that he is being more and more influenced by the thinking of Nietzsche. In these letters, he advised friend Oscar Ghiglia,

 

“(hold sacred all) which can exalt and excite your intelligence... (and) ... seek to provoke ... and to perpetuate ... these fertile stimuli, because they can push the intelligence to its maximum creative power.”

 

The work of Lautréamont was equally influential at this time. This doomed poet's Les Chants de Maldoror became the seminal work for the Parisian Surrealists of Modigliani's generation, and the book became Modigliani's favourite to the extent that he learnt it by heart. The poetry of Lautréamont is characterised by the juxtaposition of fantastical elements, and by sadistic imagery; the fact that Modigliani was so taken by this text in his early teens gives a good indication of his developing tastes. Baudelaire and D'Annunzio similarly appealed to the young artist, with their interest in corrupted beauty, and the expression of that insight through Symbolist imagery.

 

Modigliani wrote to Ghiglia extensively from Capri, where his mother had taken him to assist in his recovery from the tuberculosis. These letters are a sounding board for the developing ideas brewing in Modigliani's mind. Ghiglia was seven years Modigliani's senior, and it is likely that it was he who showed the young man the limits of his horizons in Livorno. Like all precocious teenagers, Modigliani preferred the company of older companions, and Ghiglia's role in his adolescence was to be a sympathetic ear as he worked himself out, principally in the convoluted letters that he regularly sent, and which survive today.

 

“Dear friend

I write to pour myself out to you and to affirm myself to myself. I am the prey of great powers that surge forth and then disintegrate... A bourgeois told me today - insulted me - that I or at least my brain was lazy. It did me good. I should like such a warning every morning upon awakening: but they cannot understand us nor can they understand life...”

 

Paris

 

Arrival

 

In 1906 Modigliani moved to Paris, then the focal point of the avant-garde. In fact, his arrival at the epicentre of artistic experimentation coincided with the arrival of two other foreigners who were also to leave their marks upon the art world: Gino Severini and Juan Gris.

 

He settled in Le Bateau-Lavoir, a commune for penniless artists in Montmartre, renting himself a studio in Rue Caulaincourt. Even though this artists' quarter of Montmartre was characterised by generalised poverty, Modigliani himself presented - initially, at least - as one would expect the son of a family trying to maintain the appearances of its lost financial standing to present: his wardrobe was dapper without ostentation, and the studio he rented was appointed in a style appropriate to someone with a finely attuned taste in plush drapery and Renaissance reproductions. He soon made efforts to assume the guise of the bohemian artist, but, even in his brown corduroys, scarlet scarf and large black hat, he continued to appear as if he were slumming it, having fallen upon harder times.

 

When he first arrived in Paris, he wrote home regularly to his mother, he sketched his nudes at the Colarossi school, and he drank wine in moderation. He was at that time considered by those who knew him as a bit reserved, verging on the asocial. He is noted to have commented, upon meeting Picasso who, at the time, was wearing his trademark workmen's clothes, that even though the man was a genius, that did not excuse his uncouth appearance.

 

Transformation

 

Within a year of arriving in Paris, however, his demeanour and reputation had changed dramatically. He transformed himself from a dapper academician artist into a sort of prince of vagabonds.

 

The poet and journalist Louis Latourette, upon visiting the artist's previously well-appointed studio after his transformation, discovered the place in upheaval, the Renaissance reproductions discarded from the walls, the plush drapes in disarray. Modigliani was already an alcoholic and a drug addict by this time, and his studio reflected this. Modigliani's behaviour at this time sheds some light upon his developing style as an artist, in that the studio had become almost a sacrificial effigy for all that he resented about the academic art that had marked his life and his training up to that point.

 

Not only did he remove all the trappings of his bourgeois heritage from his studio, but he also set about destroying practically all of his own early work. He explained this extraordinary course of actions to his astonished neighbours thus:

“Childish baubles, done when I was a dirty bourgeois."

 

The motivation for this violent rejection of his earlier self is the subject of considerable speculation. The self-destructive tendencies may have stemmed from his tuberculosis and the knowledge (or presumption) that the disease had essentially marked him for an early death; within the artists' quarter, many faced the same sentence, and the typical response was to set about enjoying life while it lasted, principally by indulging in self-destructive actions. For Modigliani such behavior may have been a response to a lack of recognition; it is known that he sought the company of other alcoholic artists such as Utrillo and Soutine, seeking acceptance and validation for his work from his colleagues.

 

Modigliani's behavior stood out even in these Bohemian surroundings: he carried on frequent affairs, drank heavily, and used absinthe and hashish. While drunk he would sometimes strip himself naked at social gatherings. He became the epitome of the tragic artist, creating a posthumous legend almost as well-known as that of Vincent van Gogh.

 

During the 1920s, in the wake of Modigliani's career and spurred on by comments by Andre Salmon crediting hashish and absinthe with the genesis of Modigliani's style, many hopefuls tried to emulate his 'success' by embarking on a path of substance abuse and bohemian excess. Salmon claimed—erroneously—that whereas Modigliani was a totally pedestrian artist when sober,

 

“...from the day that he abandoned himself to certain forms of debauchery, an unexpected light came upon him, transforming his art. From that day on, he became one who must be counted among the masters of living art.”

 

While this propaganda served as a rallying cry to those with a romantic longing to be a tragic, doomed artist, these strategies did not produce unique artistic insights or techniques in those who did not already have them.

 

In fact, art historians suggest that it is entirely possible for Modigliani to have achieved even greater artistic heights had he not been immured in, and destroyed by, his own self-indulgences. We can only speculate what he might have accomplished had he emerged intact from his self-destructive explorations.

 

Output

 

During his early years in Paris, Modigliani worked at a furious pace. He was constantly sketching, making as many as a hundred drawings a day. However, many of his works were lost - destroyed by him as inferior, left behind in his frequent changes of address, or given to girlfriends who did not keep them.

 

He was first influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, but around 1907 he became fascinated with the work of Paul Cézanne. Eventually he developed his own unique style, one that cannot be adequately categorized with other artists.

 

He met the first serious love of his life, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, in 1910, when he was 26. They had studios in the same building, and although 21-year-old Anna was recently married, they began an affair. Tall (Modigliani was only 5 foot 5 inches) with dark hair (like Modigliani's), pale skin and grey-green eyes, she embodied Modigliani's aesthetic ideal and the pair became engrossed in each other. After a year, however, Anna returned to her husband.

 

Experiments with sculpture

 

In 1909, Modigliani returned home to Livorno, sickly and tired from his wild lifestyle. Soon he was back in Paris, this time renting a studio in Montparnasse. He originally saw himself as a sculptor rather than a painter, and was encouraged to continue after Paul Guillaume, an ambitious young art dealer, took an interest in his work and introduced him to sculptor Constantin Brancusi.

 

Although a series of Modigliani's sculptures were exhibited in the Salon d'Automne of 1912, he abruptly abandoned sculpting and focused solely on his painting.

 

Question of influences

 

In Modigliani's art, there is evidence of the influence of primitive art from Africa and Cambodia which he may have seen in the Musée de l'Homme, but his stylisations are just as likely to have been the result of his being surrounded by Mediaeval sculpture during his studies in Northern Italy (there is no recorded information from Modigliani himself, as there is with Picasso and others, to confirm the contention that he was influenced by either ethnic or any other kind of sculpture). A possible interest in African tribal masks seems to be evident in his portraits. In both his painting and sculpture, the sitters' faces resemble ancient Egyptian painting in their flat and masklike appearance, with distinctive almond eyes, pursed mouths, twisted noses, and elongated necks. However these same chacteristics are shared by Medieval European sculpture and painting.

 

Modigliani painted a series of portraits of contemporary artists and friends in Montparnasse: Chaim Soutine, Moise Kisling, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Marie "Marevna" Vorobyev-Stebeslka, Juan Gris, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, and Jean Cocteau, all sat for stylized renditions.

 

At the outset of World War I, Modigliani tried to enlist in the army but was refused because of his poor health.

 

The war years

 

Known as Modì, which roughly translates as 'morbid' or 'moribund', by many Parisians, but as Dedo to his family and friends, Modigliani was a handsome man, and attracted much female attention.

 

Women came and went until Beatrice Hastings entered his life. She stayed with him for almost two years, was the subject for several of his portraits, including Madame Pompadour, and the object of much of his drunken wrath.

 

When the British painter Nina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse in 1914, on her first evening there the smiling man at the next table in the café introduced himself as Modigliani; painter and Jew. They became great friends.

 

In 1916, Modigliani befriended the Polish poet and art dealer Leopold Zborovski and his wife Anna.

 

Jeanne Hébuterne

 

The following summer, the Russian sculptor Chana Orloff introduced him to a beautiful 19-year-old art student named Jeanne Hébuterne who had posed for Foujita. From a conservative bourgeois background, Hébuterne was renounced by her devout Roman Catholic family for her liaison with the painter, whom they saw as little more than a debauched derelict, and, worse yet, a Jew. Despite her family's objections, soon they were living together, and although Hébuterne was the love of his life, their public scenes became more renowned than Modigliani's individual drunken exhibitions.

 

On December 3, 1917, Modigliani's first one-man exhibition opened at the Berthe Weill Gallery. The chief of the Paris police was scandalized by Modigliani's nudes and forced him to close the exhibition within a few hours after its opening.

 

After he and Hébuterne moved to Nice, she became pregnant and on November 29, 1918 gave birth to a daughter whom they named Jeanne (1918-1984).

 

Nice

 

During a trip to Nice, conceived and organized by Leopold Zborovski, Modigliani, Tsuguharu Foujita and other artists tried to sell their works to rich tourists. Modigliani managed to sell a few pictures but only for a few francs each. Despite this, during this time he produced most of the paintings that later became his most popular and valued works.

 

During his lifetime he sold a number of his works, but never for any great amount of money. What funds he did receive soon vanished for his habits.

 

In May of 1919 he returned to Paris, where, with Hébuterne and their daughter, he rented an apartment in the rue de la Grande Chaumière. While there, both Jeanne Hébuterne and Amedeo Modigliani painted portraits of each other, and of themselves.

 

Last days

 

Although he continued to paint, Modigliani's health was deteriorating rapidly, and his alcohol-induced blackouts became more frequent.

 

In 1920, after not hearing from him for several days, his downstairs neighbor checked on the family and found Modigliani in bed delirious and holding onto Hébuterne who was nearly nine months pregnant. They summoned a doctor, but little could be done because Modigliani was dying of the then-incurable disease tubercular meningitis.

 

Modigliani died on January 24, 1920. There was an enormous funeral, attended by many from the artistic communities in Montmartre and Montparnasse.

 

Hébuterne was taken to her parents' home, where, inconsolable, she threw herself out of a fifth-floor window two days after Modigliani's death, killing herself and her unborn child. Modigliani was interred in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Hébuterne was buried at the Cimetière de Bagneux near Paris, and it was not until 1930 that her embittered family allowed her body to be moved to rest beside Modigliani.

 

Modigliani died penniless and destitute—managing only one solo exhibition in his life and giving his work away in exchange for meals in restaurants. Had he lived through the 1920s when American buyers flooded Paris, his fortunes might well have changed. Since his death his reputation has soared. Nine novels, a play, a documentary and three feature films have been devoted to his life.

A massive phytoplankton bloom stained the waters of the Atlantic Ocean north of Iceland with brilliant jewel tones in late summer, 2014. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image on August 2. Huge colonies of the floating, plant-like organisms create swirls of green, teal and turquoise and cover over 80% of the visible ocean off the northeast coast of Iceland.

 

Marine phytoplankton require just the right amount of sunlight, dissolved nutrients and water temperatures which are not too hot, nor too cold to spark explosive reproduction and result in blooms which can cover hundreds of square kilometers. Phytoplankton form the base of the marine food chain, and are a rich food source for zooplankton, fish and other marine species. Some species, however, can deplete the water of oxygen and may become toxic to marine life.

 

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Credit: NASA

Image Number: GSFC_20171208_Archive_e001018

Date: August 2, 2014

Rollei 35 T and Rolei RPX 100 ISO

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