Head of a Woman

Amedeo Modigliani was born in Livorno, Italy, into a family of notable Sephardic and Italian Jewish background. Born at a moment of familial financial crisis, Modigliani was homeschooled by his cultivated and multilingual mother, Eugénie Garsin; he was frequently ill as a child and early on contracted the tuberculosis that would eventually take his life. After eight years of formal art education throughout Italy coupled with experiments in bohemian living under the banner of Nietzschean philosophy and Baudelairean sensibility, Modigliani settled in Paris in 1906. There he associated with Juan Gris, Chaim Soutine, Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, and other avant-garde painters, although he did not identify with any particular movement. Gaining a reputation for alcohol and drug use and a bohemian sexual lifestyle, he struggled to make ends meet and courted controversy throughout his short life. His most recognizable works include his series of portraits featuring persons with his iconic elongated necks, sculptures influenced by African art and the principles of the emerging Cubist movement, and his famed erotically charged nudes, which caused much controversy in their day but met with mixed success in Modigliani’s lifetime. Modigliani’s relationship to his Jewish background was complex and variable, but it was at times a point of pride and interest.