Movie Review: Modigliani

Paris in 1919 had seen the greatest destruction known to the world at that time come to its very suburbs. The battlefields of World War One were so close that men on leave could take taxis to the front. Perhaps it was this proximity to death and destruction, or maybe just a chance meeting of minds, but Paris became home to one of the greatest outbursts of human artistic creativity since Renaissance Italy.

The city had always been considered the centre of the artistic universe for Europeans, but at the end of World War One there was an explosion of artistic expression that was only quelled with the outbreak of World War Two. The twenty-year interval between conflicts would see those who would shape artistic expression for the twentieth century all gather within the confines of a few square blocks.

Writers, philosophers, painters, dancers, musicians and sculptors worked, loved, fought, drank, and did drugs; all of them determined to cram as much living as possible into every single moment. Having witnessed how easy it was for a life to be here one day and gone the next, no one wanted to risk not having done as much as possible.

Many of us have heard of the more famous inhabitants of the artist's quarter: Picasso, Stien, Jean Cocteau, Hemmingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But there were other, equally important, though not as renowned, men and women striving to express the emotional turmoil of the period. One of these was the sculpture/painter Amedeo Modigliani.

Supposedly, Modigliani epitomized the figure of the romantic artist struggling with passion and madness. Whether it was an artifice created on his part or not is open to debate, but what is true and known is that he lived, loved and indulged in drink and drugs excessively. While the others around him were influenced by the potential for death and destruction, Modigliani carried within him a death sentence.

As a child he had contracted tuberculosis, which in those days meant your days were numbered. Most likely it was this that inspired the excesses that shortened his life, but enriched his days. He did in fact end up dying in 1920 of tubercular meningitis.

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the recently published What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and has had his work published in print and on line all over the world. The not so long-haired Canadian iconoclast writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees …

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