Word: modigliani
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...drew sketches and wrote about herself and her friends. On Modigliani: "All he did was growl; he used to make me shiver from head to foot." On Jean Cocteau: "He gave me a necklace fit for a queen." On Utrillo: "Once, after I had been posing for him, I went around to take a look and was knocked off my pins to discover that he had been drawing a little country house...
...something to hang on the wall." Corporation Lawyer* Colin and his wife decided on modern paintings as "more appropriate in a modern apartment-old masters in the same surroundings would be chichi." Though they specialize in such safe school-of-Paris bets as Rouault, Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Soutine and Modigliani, the Colins admit to having made some poor purchases: "But we love our mistakes-we never sell or exchange them...
...Modigliani's paintings lack size, as those of a sick young man are almost bound to do. But the natural elegance and sharpness of his art and his warmth of feeling for the friends and bed-companions he painted come close to compensating, sometimes, for his weaknesses...
Today every art student knows Modigliani's name, and thousands more admire his work. Their numbers have been increased this year by a big Modigliani retrospective show at the Cleveland Museum. Last week the exhibition moved to Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. It is curiously unmodern: Modigliani cared for neither the bright splashy colors of Matisse nor the fine-chopped complexities of Picasso. People, naked or not, were what he painted...
Trapped between the bottle and the sickbed, he had to find a fast way of painting, one that took no particular study and needed little development. Compounded of his strengths and weaknesses, the style he settled for was as personal as a signature. Anybody who has seen one Modigliani can recognize a second one at a glance: almost all his painted people have swan necks, seesaw eyes and ski-run noses. Surprisingly enough, he was able to characterize each one sharply within that arbitrary formula. For traditional draftsmanship he substituted clear, smoothly looping lines that divide the canvas into locked...