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Painted by Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) in 1917. Modigliani began his celebrated series of thirty reclining nudes in 1916. Although rooted in the Renaissance depiction of Venus, his eroticized nudes are devoid of mythological or allegorical references.
Painting by Amedeo Modigliani
Edited by Mehrzad Hatami
See the original work here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Modigliani#/media/File:Amede...(ca.1917).jpg
Pupils went on to explore the tragic life and work of the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. His African influenced, mask-like faces inspired P6’s elongated, beautiful but haunting portraits created using layered oil pastels on black paper.
I started with a full sheet of watercolor paper, making the long neck and blond hair portrait, but my husband said it looked nothing like me. So I did a quick selfie and drew fast lines of me short and stocky as I am on 2/3's of a piece of watercolor paper.
Amedeo Modigliani - Italian, 1884 - 1920
Chaim Soutine, 1917
East Building, Ground Level — Gallery 103-A
Shown from the lap up, a cleanshaven man with black hair and dark clothes faces us as he sits with his hands resting together in his lap in this stylized, vertical portrait painting. The man's features, clothing, and the room are painted with areas of mottled color with visible brushstrokes, so many details are indistinct. The man has peach-colored skin, and his facial features are outlined. He has dark eyes that look at us or slightly up, under thin, arched brows. One eye is a little higher than the other, and the two halves of his long face do not quite match. He has a wide nose, and his full, dark rose-pink lips are closed. His hair is parted down the middle and is brushed down to meet his ears. He has an elongated neck, and his narrow shoulders slope down. He wears black pants and a black coat over a dark teal-green vest. A white shirt is visible along his neckline, and an area of black could be the knot of a tie. He holds the fingers of one hand in his other, both hands resting in his lap. A loosely painted, brown table sits next to the man to our right, and an area of slate blue and white could be a glass on the table. A vertical line in the background behind the man, to our right, probably indicates the corner of the room. The walls are painted with strokes of smoke gray, ocean blue, and some parchment white. The artist signed the work in dark letters in the upper right corner, “modigliani.”
Born in 1884 to an aristocratic family in Livorno, Italy, Amedeo Modigliani settled in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris in 1906 and began making paintings influenced by both the mood of Picasso's Blue period and the pictorial structure of late Cézanne. In 1909 he met Constantin Brancusi and began to focus on sculpture; the thin features and references to African art in the series of stone heads of 1909–1914 clearly reflect Brancusi's influence.
As both painter and sculptor Modigliani concentrated on portraiture. Though he abandoned sculpture in late 1913 or early 1914 to return to painting, the long necks and attenuated features of his sculptures continue in his later painted portraits. Modigliani is also renowned for a series of languorous nudes, some of which he exhibited in 1918 at the Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris; the exhibition was closed by the police on the grounds of obscenity. Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis, aggravated by drugs and alcohol, in a Paris hospital in 1920.
The 11th child of a Russian Jewish tailor, Chaim Soutine (1894–1943) was rescued from poverty and abuse by a rabbi who recognized his talent and sent him to art school—first in Minsk, then in Vilna. Soutine arrived in Paris at the age of 17 in 1911–1912 and met Modigliani in Montparnasse in about 1914. They developed a close friendship, and Modigliani painted Soutine's portrait several times. Soutine's unruly, spontaneous manner of painting was alien to his Italian friend, who, to describe his own state of drunkenness, once quipped, "Everything dances around me as in a landscape by Soutine." The elegant Modigliani felt protective of the uncouth Soutine, 10 years his junior. In 1916 Modigliani introduced his friend to his dealer, Leopold Zborowski, and urged him to handle Soutine's work, which he began to do. Shortly before Modigliani died, he told Zborowski, "Don't worry, I'm leaving you Soutine."
While many of Modigliani's portraits are either stylized and impersonal—with eyes often left blank—or almost caricatural, this painting seems to be both particular and sympathetic. Soutine sits with tumbling hair and ill-matched clothes, his hands placed awkwardly in his lap, his nose spreading across his face as he stares out of the frame. The half-closed eyes, one slightly higher than the other, might suggest Soutine's despair and hopelessness, attitudes with which Modigliani could identify as a poor artist in Paris. Modigliani's treatment of Soutine may also reflect the special place that Soutine had won in the older artist's affections.
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www.nga.gov/about/welcome-to-the-east-building.html
The East Building opened in 1978 in response to the changing needs of the National Gallery, mainly to house a growing collection of modern and contemporary art. The building itself is a modern masterpiece. The site's trapezoidal shape prompted architect I.M. Pei's dramatic approach: two interlocking spaces shaped like triangles provide room for a library, galleries, auditoriums, and administrative offices. Inside the ax-blade-like southwest corner, a colorful, 76-foot-long Alexander Calder mobile dominates the sunlight atrium. Visitors can view a dynamic 500-piece collection of photography, paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and media arts in thought-provoking chronological, thematic, and stylistic arrangements.
Highlights include galleries devoted to Mark Rothko's giant, glowing canvases; Barnett Newman's 14 stark black, gray, and white canvas paintings from The Stations of the Cross, 1958–1966; and several colorful and whimsical Alexander Calder mobiles and sculptures. You can't miss Katharina Fritsch's Hahn/Cock, 2013, a tall blue rooster that appears to stand guard over the street and federal buildings from the roof terrace, which also offers views of the Capitol. The upper-level gallery showcases modern art from 1910 to 1980, including masterpieces by Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Sam Gilliam, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. Ground-level galleries are devoted to American art from 1900 to 1950, including pieces by George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and Alfred Stieglitz. The concourse level is reserved for rotating special exhibitions.
The East Building Shop is on the concourse level, and the Terrace Café looks out over the atrium from the upper level.
www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/03/national-gallery-...
"The structure asks for its visitors to gradually make their way up from the bottom, moving from the Gallery’s earliest acquisitions like the paintings of French Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard to its contemporary work, such as Janine Antoni’s much fussed over “Lick and Lather,” a series of busts composed of chocolate and soap. The bottom floors offer a more traditional viewing experience: small taupe-colored rooms leading to more small taupe-colored rooms. As one moves upward, however, the spaces open up, offering more dramatic and artful exhibition rooms. The largest single aspect of the I.M. Pei-designed building’s renovation has been the addition of a roof terrace flanked by a reimagination two of the three original “tower” rooms of Pei’s design.
On one side is a space dedicated to sculptor Alexander Calder, with gently spinning mobiles of all shapes and sizes delicately cascading from the ceiling. The subtle movements of the fine wire pieces mimic the effect of a slight breeze through wind chimes—it’s both relaxing and slightly mesmerizing, especially when we’re used to art that stands stock still. Delight is a relatively rare emotion to emerge in a museum, making it all the more compelling.
But it’s the tower space on the other side—a divided hexagonal room—that caused several visitors to gasp as I surveyed it. On one side of the division (the room you enter from the roof terrace) hang Barnett Newman’s fourteen “Stations of the Cross,” the human-sized renderings of secular suffering and pain conceived in conversation with the Bible story. Entirely black and white, with just a tinge of red in the final painting, the series wraps around the viewer, fully encapsulating you in the small but meaningful differentiations between paintings. Hung as a series, the paintings gain a narrative they might otherwise have lost.
The light edging around either side of the room’s division invite the viewer to move from Newman’s chiaroscuric works, which require you to move from painting to painting searching for the scene in each, to a mirror image of that space covered in Mark Rothko’s giant, glowing canvases, which require the viewer to step back and attempt to take in the sight of so much hazy, vivid color all at once. The dichotomy is stark, and yet the paintings all work together somehow, rather than one set repelling the other.
With light filtering through the glass ceiling above, the tower room does feel like a crescendo of sorts, but not in the way many museums’ most famous or valuable pieces often do. The room isn’t dedicated to ensuring that visitors snake their way into the belly of the museum, to first be captured and then let out through the gift shop. Instead, it’s a reminder that in a space dedicated to honoring the modern and the contemporary that the evolution of art remains just as integral as any singular Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol or Donald Judd aluminum box. There’s still a story in abstract art."
www.washingtonian.com/2016/09/28/national-gallery-art-eas...
MAD 3 • EUROPE 2017
Madrid, Spain • September 18, 2017 • Europe 2017, day 20
Head of a Woman. Kiki? (1915), section • Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920).
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza / Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Paseo del Prado, 8), Madrid, Spain.
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