1.
Amedeo Modigliani
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Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian Jewish painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a style characterized by elongation of faces and figures, that were not received well during his lifetime. Modigliani spent his youth in Italy, where he studied the art of antiquity, there he came into contact with prominent artists such as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. Modiglianis œuvre includes paintings and drawings, from 1909 to 1914, however, he devoted himself mainly to sculpture. His main subject was portraits and full figures of humans, both in the images and in the sculptures, during his life, Amedeo Modigliani had little success, but after his death he achieved greater popularity and his works of art achieved high prices. He died at age 35 in Paris of tubercular meningitis, Modigliani was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno, Italy. A port city, Livorno had long served as a refuge for those persecuted for their religion and his maternal great-great-grandfather, Solomon Garsin, had immigrated to Livorno in the 18th century as a refugee. Fluent in many languages, her ancestors were authorities on sacred Jewish texts and had founded a school of Talmudic studies, family legend traced the family lineage to the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The family business was an agency with branches in Livorno, Marseille, Tunis. Modigliani’s father, Flaminio, was a member of an Italian Jewish family of successful businessmen, while not as culturally sophisticated as the Garsins, they knew how to invest in and develop thriving business endeavors. When the Garsin and Modigliani families announced the engagement of their children and he managed the mine in Sardinia and also managed the almost 30,000 acres of timberland the family owned. A reversal in fortune occurred to this family in 1883. An economic downturn in the price of metal plunged the Modiglianis into bankruptcy, ever resourceful, Modigliani’s mother used her social contacts to establish a school and, along with her two sisters, made the school into a successful enterprise. Modigliani was the child, whose birth coincided with the disastrous financial collapse of his fathers business interests. Amedeos birth saved the family from ruin, according to an ancient law, the bailiffs entered the familys home just as Eugenia went into labour, the family protected their most valuable assets by piling them on top of her. Modigliani had a relationship with his mother, who taught him at home until he was 10. Beset with health problems after an attack of pleurisy when he was about 11, when he was 16 he was taken ill again and contracted the tuberculosis which would later claim his life. After Modigliani recovered from the bout of pleurisy, his mother took him on a tour of southern Italy, Naples, Capri, Rome and Amalfi
2.
Art Institute of Chicago
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The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879 and located in Chicagos Grant Park, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. Recognized for its efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 million guests annually. The growth of the collection has warranted several additions to the museums original 1893 building, the Art Institute is connected to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a leading art school, making it one of the few remaining unified arts institutions in the United States. In 1866, a group of 35 artists founded the Chicago Academy of Design in a studio on Dearborn Street, the organization was modeled after European art academies, such as the Royal Academy, with Academicians and Associate Academicians. The Academys charter was granted in March 1867, classes started in 1868, meeting every day at a cost of $10 per month. The Academys success enabled it to build a new home for the school, a stone building on 66 West Adams Street. When the Great Chicago Fire destroyed the building in 1871 the Academy was thrown into debt, attempts to continue despite the loss by using rented facilities failed. By 1878 the Academy was $10,000 in debt, members tried to rescue the ailing institution by making deals with local businessmen, before some finally abandoned it in 1879 to found a new organization, named the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. When the Chicago Academy of Design went bankrupt the same year, in 1882, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts changed its name to the current Art Institute of Chicago and elected as its first president the banker and philanthropist Charles L. Also in 1882, the purchased a lot on the southwest corner of Michigan Avenue. By January 1885 the trustees recognized the need to provide space for the organizations growing collection. The city agreed, and the building was completed in time for the year of the fair. Construction costs were met by selling the Michigan/Van Buren property, on October 31,1893 the Institute moved into the new building. For the opening reception on December 8,1893, Theodore Thomas, from the 1900s to the 1960s the school offered with the Logan Family the Logan Medal of the Arts, an award which became one of the most distinguished awards presented to artists in the US. Between 1959 and 1970 the Institute was a key site in the battle to gain art and documentary photography a place in galleries, under curator Hugh Edwards and his assistants. As Director of the museum starting in the early 1980s, James N. Wood conducted an expansion of its collection. He retired from the museum in 2004, in 2006, the Art Institute began construction of The Modern Wing, an addition situated on the southwest corner of Columbus and Monroe. The project, designed by Pritzker Prize winning architect Renzo Piano, was completed, the 264, 000-square-foot building makes the Art Institute the second-largest art museum in the United States
3.
Jacques Lipchitz
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Jacques Lipchitz was a Cubist sculptor, from late 1914. In 1920 Lipchitz held his first solo exhibition, at Léonce Rosenbergs Galerie LEffort Moderne in Paris, fleeing the Nazis he came to the US and settled in New York City and eventually Hastings-on-Hudson. Jacques Lipchitz was born Chaim Jacob Lipschitz, in a Litvak family, son of a contractor in Druskininkai, Lithuania. At first, under the influence of his father, he studied engineering, but soon after, supported by his mother he moved to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, living in this environment, Lipchitz soon began to create Cubist sculpture. In 1912 he exhibited at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, in 1922 he was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania to execute five bas-reliefs. With artistic innovation at its height, in the 1920s he experimented with abstract forms he called transparent sculptures, later he developed a more dynamic style, which he applied with telling effect to bronze compositions of figures and animals. With the German occupation of France during World War II, with the assistance of the American journalist Varian Fry in Marseille, he escaped the Nazi regime and went to the United States. There, he settled in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. He was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the Third Sculpture International Exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949 and he has been identified among seventy of those sculptors in a photograph Life magazine published that was taken at the exhibition. In 1954 a Lipchitz retrospective traveled from The Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, in 1959, his series of small bronzes To the Limit of the Possible was shown at Fine Arts Associates in New York. Beginning in 1963 he returned to Europe for several months of year and worked in Pietrasanta. He developed a friendship with fellow sculptor, Fiore de Henriquez. In 1972 his autobiography, co-authored with H, harvard Arnason, was published on the occasion of an exhibition of his sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Jacques Lipchitz died in Capri, Italy and his body was flown to Jerusalem for burial. Hammacher, Abraham Marie, Jacques Lipchitz, His Sculpture, New York, hope, Henry Radford, The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz, New York, Plantin press, printed for the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art,1954. Lipchitz, Jacques, My Life in Sculpture, New York, stott, Deborah A. Jacques Lipchitz and Cubism, New York, Garland Pub. Van Bork, Bert, Jacques Lipchitz, The Artist at Work, New York, wilkinson, Alan G. Jacques Lipchitz, A Life in Sculpture, Toronto, Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario,1989. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem donated by Mr. Hanno D. Mott, interactive online version published 2010 Lipchitz, Jacques, Encyclopedia Treccani. it Jacques Lipchitz in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
4.
Death mask
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A death mask is an image, typically in wax or plaster cast made of a persons face following death, often by taking a cast or impression directly from the corpse. Death masks may be mementos of the dead, or be used for creation of portraits, in other cultures a death mask may be a funeral mask, an image placed on the face of the deceased before burial rites, and normally buried with them. The best known of these are the used by ancient Egyptians as part of the mummification process, such as Tutankhamuns mask. In some European countries, it was common for death masks to be used as part of the effigy of the deceased, displayed at state funerals, mourning portraits were also painted, showing the subject lying in repose. During the 18th and 19th centuries masks were used to permanently record the features of unknown corpses for purposes of identification. This function was replaced by post-mortem photography. In the cases of people whose faces were damaged by their death, an example of this occurred in the case of Thomas DArcy McGee, the Canadian statesman whose face was shattered by the bullet which assassinated him in 1868. When taken from a subject, such a cast is called a life mask. Proponents of phrenology used both death masks and life masks for pseudoscientific purposes, masks of deceased persons are part of traditions in many countries. A special element of the rite was a mask, put on the face of the deceased. This mask was believed to strengthen the spirit of the mummy, the best known mask is Tutankhamuns mask. Made of gold and gems, the conveys the highly stylized features of the ancient ruler. Such masks were not, however, made from casts of the features, rather, in 1876 the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered in Mycenae six graves, which he was confident belonged to kings and ancient Greek heroes—Agamemnon, Cassandra, Evrimdon and their associates. To his surprise, the skulls were covered with gold masks and it is now thought most unlikely that the masks actually belonged to Agamemnon and other heroes of the Homeric epics, in fact they are several centuries older. The lifelike character of Roman portrait sculptures has been attributed to the earlier Roman use of wax to preserve the features of deceased family members, the wax masks were subsequently reproduced in more durable stone. The use of masks in the cult is also attested in Etruria. Excavations of tombs in the area of the ancient city of Clusium have yielded a number of sheet bronze masks dating from the Etruscan Late Orientalising period. In the 19th century it was thought that they were related to the Mycenaean examples, the most credited hypothesis holds that they were originally fixed to cinerary urns, to give them a human appearance
5.
The Boy (Modigliani)
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The Boy is an oil painting by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani created in 1919. It is currently part of the permanent collection at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the portrait is of an unknown male youth, sitting at a chair, his left elbow on a table, and his head resting on his palm. The Boy is a typical Modigliani portrait, the boys face is elongated into an oval, his eyes are hollow and without pupils. He wears a shirt, that seems to blend him into the background. His cheeks are rosy and youthful, which contrasts with the hollow eyes and his face is mask-like and expressionless. The portrait is enlivened by the brushstrokes, even in the limited color palette. Unlike most of Modiglianis subjects, this sitter cannot be identified, Modigliani was dying of tubercular meningitis by the time he painted this portrait. He was forced by his doctors to move to southern France from Paris, along with this, Paris was becoming increasingly less safe as World War I heightened. While there, Modigliani shifted his focus to painting unnamed, young workers, Modiglianis portraits and sculptures reveal the influence of ancient Greek and African sculpture that started to hold more sway in the modern art world. Modiglianis work is recognized by his elegent, elongated figures. The painting was purchased from the artist by Leopold Zborowski, a Polish-born art dealer who represented Modigliani, by 1929, it was bought by Maurice J. Speiser, a Philadelphia-based attorney and patron of the arts, and was illustrated in a Modern Art catalog that same year. It was auctioned in New York in January 1944 and it was likely purchased by Theodore Schempp from there. The painting was bought from him in 1946, with funds given by Mrs. Julian Bobbs, in memory of William Ray Adams
6.
Modigliani (film)
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It is based on the life of the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. Set in Paris in 1919, this presents the life of Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, centering, artistically, on his relationship to. Modigliani, an Italian Jew from Livorno, has fallen in love with Jeanne, the couple has a child, and Jeannes bigoted father sends the baby to a faraway convent to be raised by nuns. Modigliani is distraught but needs money to rescue and raise his child, Paris annual art competition is in the offing. Prize money and a guaranteed career await the winner, neither Modigliani nor his rival Picasso have ever entered the competition, believing that it is beneath true artists like themselves. All of Paris is aflutter with excitement at who will win, Modigliani tackles the work of his entry with the hopes of creating a masterpiece, and knows that all the artists of Paris are doing the same. Once completed, he calls his agent and dearest friend, Léopold Zborowski, personally to take the painting to the competition, while his friend is taking the painting, Modigliani is at City Hall waiting to finally obtain a marriage license. As the last person to leave, he decides to celebrate with one drink, unfortunately his addiction, and his nervousness about the competition, make him drink many more. The competition was going to start at eight oclock, and when he realizes he is very late he finally rushes out, without paying. While drinking, he had asked whether he had the money to pay. Two guys that were in the bar follow him and assault and severely beat him, once they find that he has no money they leave him in the snow, bloody and more than half dead. His painting of Jeanne in a dress he had stolen from a shop window wins the competition. Unaware of this victory, he manages to make it home. But then his artist friends come, realize that he needs to be in a hospital, Jeanne commits suicide by falling from a window. They are buried together, along with the unborn child, Jeanne Hébuterne, Modiglianis chief love interest Omid Djalili. Pablo Picasso, Modiglianis rival Hippolyte Girardot, olga Khokhlova, Picassos wife Udo Kier. Berthe Weill The film was not well received by some critics, on the other hand, Rex Reed of the New York Observer said this was A film of vitality, with imagery as haunting and romantic as it is intense. According to Rotten Tomatoes 79% of the audience liked the film, appearing at a number of film festivals in 2004 and 2005, Modigliani saw its world premiere at the Gala Selection of the Toronto International Film Festival
