Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) was born in the Italian town of Leghorn of Jewish parents. He began to study art in 1898 with the landscape painter Micheli and as a youth suffered two severe illnesses with onset in 1901 of tuberculosis.
Modigliani visited Naples, Capri, Rome, Florence and Venice to recuperate. He then attended classes at the Florence Academy under Fattori in 1902 and at the Institute of Fine Arts in Venice in 1903. He then moved to Paris in 1906 and worked under the influence of Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, the Fauves and then Cézanne.
After befriending Maurice Utrillo in Montmartre he took to excessive drinking and drugs and was frequently in poverty. He met Brancusi in 1909 and worked mainly as a sculptor between 1910 and 1914 making stone carvings of elongated heads. He then produced many paintings after 1914 developing a rhythmic linear stylization.
Modigliani, who befriended Soutine, Kisling and Lipchitz, always had great difficulty selling his works at fair prices, though helped by Zborowski and Paul Guillaume. Regarded as a major artist of the School of Paris he had his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Berthe Weill in 1917 in Paris and lived with his favourite model Jeanne Hébuterne. He worked from March 1918 to May 1919 in Southern France and died in Paris. Jeanne Hébuterne killed herself after his death. His worth are now worth between US $ 1 million and 15 million.
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