Word: picasso
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...Washington.) But the famous charm of his art is the other explanation. He settled early upon a formula of powerful appeal, a convergence of fastidious lines and abstracted facial features, of intimacy and enigma, that made modernism inviting, even comfortable. He didn't dynamite the human form as Picasso did or distill it to its essence like Matisse. In Modigliani's work the figure doesn't look aggressively, truculently modern. Modernized is more like it, gently conformed to what would turn out to be the ever emerging middle-class notion of newness...
...could be a difficult man. "As inhuman as glass" is how he was once recalled by his friend Max Jacob, the gay French poet and Jewish convert to Catholicism who also insinuated himself for a time deeply into the life of Picasso: "Everything in [him] tended toward purity in art. His insupportable pride, his black ingratitude, his haughtiness." But Modigliani sprang after all from a proud and unconventional family. He was born in the Tuscan port town of Livorno, a cosmopolitan city where Jews had lived freely since the Renaissance. Educated and progressive--his mother shocked her in-laws...
...early teens he quit school to study drawing full time, and in the years that followed he would study painting in Florence and sculpture in the marble quarries of Carrara. By 1906 he was ready for Paris. It was by then the cockpit of modernity, the Paris of Picasso, Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck. Some of the first canvases in this show are portraits of women painted in Modigliani's earliest style, a gaunt Expressionism bearing all the signs of Edvard Munch and Picasso's by then discarded Blue Period, undertaken with broken brushwork learned from the canvases of Cezanne...
...million Winning bid for Boy with a Pipe, an early work by Pablo Picasso, making it the most expensive painting ever sold at auction...
...lunging, irregular exterior wrapped in folds of glass covered with a honeycomb of steel. There are hook holes all over it, so the window washers can scale the angled surface like rock climbers. As buildings go, this one manages to look both precarious and enduring, headlong and immemorial. If Picasso ever painted a library, it might look like this...