Easy on the eye

Hard on the heels of the National Gallery’s show Rebels and Martyrs, about the changing perception of the artist, comes this exhibition of Modigliani’s paintings. The title makes a shameless and immediate reference to the myth of the decadent bohemian surrounded by lovers. This may serve to attract the punters, but it doesn’t help us take the art more seriously.

Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) was a middle-class Italian Sephardic Jew, born in Livorno, who left home for the bright artistic lights of Paris in 1906, and tragically never found success there. As an artist he has been ill served by the legend that grew up around him, the misplaced glamour of self-destructiveness and early death. He was hard-working but subject to abrupt mood changes, a man of great charisma and personal beauty who strove to make art which would matter. Influenced towards extreme formal simplification by a study of archaic sculpture and the example of Brancusi, Modigliani carved extensively in limestone before returning to paint in 1914.