Amedeo Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor, born in Livorno in 1884, who worked in Paris and died there on 24 January 1920, aged 35. He is known for long-necked portraits and reclining nudes, and above all for faces whose eyes are left blank. His death is the other thing people remember: two days later his partner, Jeanne Hébuterne, nine months pregnant, threw herself from a window.
Look at his portraits of Jeanne and the eyes are almost always empty. Of the 26 portraits of her in the standard catalogue, only four show an iris and a pupil. Modigliani never wrote down why.
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The most repeated explanation is a sentence put in his mouth: that he would paint a sitter's eyes once he knew her soul. It appears on thousands of pages, and I could not trace it to anything he wrote. He left no diary and almost no notes, so every account of what he meant comes from other people, or from the canvases.
The canvases are less simple than the sentence. When Tate researchers put a profile portrait of Jeanne at the Barnes Foundation under infrared imaging, they found faint outlines of irises under the paint, beneath eyes that look pale blue and empty to the naked eye. Whatever the blankness meant, the eyes were not simply forgotten.
Around those faces grew the legend of the doomed drunk of Montparnasse. Some of it holds up. Some of it, like the date usually given for Jeanne's death, does not.
What You'll Discover
Why he traded paint for stone.
What the police saw in the window.
Who the girl in the portraits was.
What he never explained about the eyes.
How his last ten days ended.