Word: modigliani
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...just 14 years old, and spindly, when typhoid fever struck him. Lying abed, in the ghetto of Leghorn, Amedeo Modigliani raved about Italy's long-dead Renaissance, and confessed to his own longing to paint. His mother heard, and promised to send him to art school...
Eight years later, when Modigliani turned up in Paris, he was still not much of an artist, and it was already obvious that his time was short. His lungs were bad. A black-eyed, elegant young fellow, he kept to himself, painted furiously, and destroyed most of it as he went along. Soon Matisse, Picasso, Utrillo and Brancusi took him up, introduced him to cubism, African sculpture, and cafe life. The combination freed him from his academic inhibitions: he began painting pictures that were worth keeping. Then he set about destroying himself...
...fashionable clothes for one baggy, brown velvet suit, and took to staggering up & down the steep streets of Montmartre, drinking wine and coughing blood. He and Utrillo would wander into bars, introducing each other to the drunks inside as the "greatest painter in the world"; when the cops came, Modigliani would be carried off, excitedly reciting Dante to the uncomprehending constabulary. Head-wagging Parisians called him the peintre maudit (cursed painter...
...decided to be a musician. For six years he worked hard at piano, musical theory and composition, but an ear infection made him too deaf to go on with it. At 17, he went to Paris to study art and slavishly imitated his teachers, Van Dongen and Modigliani. Back home he discovered and concentrated on Guatemalan folk themes, spearheading the racial art movement which revolutionized Latin American painting. Later he went abstract, tried to paint a kind of visual music which would be empty of pictorial meaning, but beautifully composed and rich in color harmonies. In 1937 Mérida...
...Perelman like many another fledgling writer headed posthaste for Montparnasse. A redoubtable tosspot and coxcomb, he was celebrated throughout the Quarter for drinking Modigliani under the table; his fondness for this potent Italian apéritif still remains unabated. In 1925, disguised as Ashton-Wolfe of the Sûreté, he took to frequenting the milieu, the sinister district centering about the rue de Lappe. As 'Papa' Thernardier, he organized the gang that stole a towel from the Hotel Claridge and defaced the blotters at the American Express Co. A démarche from the Quai...