Modigliani

One of MODIGLIANI's greatest regrets was not continuing as a sculptor: the enigmatically sensuous "Crouching caryatid" in roughly-hewn boulder-like stone showcased his skills at making every sculpted surface part work together and at reducing forms to their most basic parts. His drawings and paintings put sculpturally-influenced emphases on the sitter's eyes, hands, mouth and shoulders: "Hanka Zborowska" had Brancusi-style tightly compressed features in a thin face looking like a 3-D polished metal sculpture. Avoiding naturalism and tending towards Art Nouveau, MODIGLIANI painted nudes, portraits and some rare landscapes: "Landscape at Cagnes" was painted vertically like head- and shoulders-sized portraits, with cypresses people-like in their oval leaves and waveringly thin-stemmed trunks. His painting became an art of expressive forms and geometrically simple lines influenced by African art and Cezanne: "Jeanne Hebuterne" pregnant, with an African mask face on a swan's neck symbolically linking the cerebral and the physical, a line forming the head-neck-shoulders axis, and a suite of curved arabesques forming the body; "Paul Alexandre," with Cezanne-type dominating and subsidiary hues deepening statue-like modeled light and shade against a green background and with Titian- and Velazquez-style formal stance and spread fingers; and "Raymond Radiguet," as a fraily sensitive 12-year-old, childlike and prophetic with one eye intensely blue and one blankly inward-looking. Author Carol Mann explains MODIGLIANI's art by a clearly written and nicely illustrated text. Her book works with Jose Maria Faerna's DE CHIRICO and MODIGLIANI to show the influences on the artist from the art of Jonathan Brown's VELAZQUEZ; the ART NOUVEAU books by Robert Fitzgerald, Edmund Vincent Gillon Jr or Paul Greenhalgh; the CEZANNE books by Henri Lallemand or Pavel Machotka; and Filippo Pedrocco's TITIAN.

This book is a wonderful introduction to Modigliani's work. I was impressed with the beauty and variety of full-page color plates of his paintings and sculpture. These illustrations are accompanied by text that describe not only the individual works, but also the progression, development and influential people/artists in Modigliani's lifetime. A breif bibliography is included. My interest in this artist has increased after reading this book.