Amedeo Modigliani is known at a glance by the long necks and almond eyes of his sitters, but that manner came late. From 1909 he spent several years working mostly in stone, and some of his early canvases hide other pictures under the paint. In 2010 a burglar walked out of a Paris museum with one of his late portraits, and it is still missing.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
A Painter Who Needed Sitters
Modigliani painted people, nearly always one at a time, and he painted them from life. Each portrait meant someone sitting in the room with him, session after session: a friend, a lover, a dealer, a poet, or a model whose fee a dealer paid.
Sitters cost time, and often money he did not have, so more than once he painted over a canvas he had already used. For some years before the First World War, after he met the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, he worked mostly at carving.
The works chosen run from his first years in Paris to his last months in 1919, by way of the south of France. I kept one carved work from the years of stone, because I think the later paintings are easier to read beside it.
12. Woman with a Fan (1919)
The fan is closed. The woman in the dark dress holds it shut, and her neck is drawn out to the length that had become Modigliani's habit. He painted Woman with a Fan in Paris in 1919, soon after he came back from more than a year in the south of France.
By May 2010 the picture hung in the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the modern art museum run by the city, whose motion detectors had been out of order for two months. One night a burglar named Vjeran Tomic, whom the French press called Spider-Man, took out a pane of glass and climbed in.
Tomic had come for a single canvas by the painter Fernand Léger, the only picture he had been commissioned to take. Once inside, he walked through the galleries and took four more: a Picasso, a Matisse, a Braque and this Modigliani. According to reports of the trial, the Modigliani hung apart from the others and caught his eye.
The theft came to court in February 2017. Tomic was sentenced to eight years in prison, and two accomplices, Jean-Michel Corvez and Yonathan Birn, to seven and six. Birn told the court that he had panicked and thrown the canvases into the trash.
The judges did not believe him, because nothing showed that the paintings had been destroyed. None of the five canvases has been seen since.
At a Glance
Artist: Amedeo Modigliani (1884 to 1920)
Painted: 1919, Paris
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: Not published
Where to see it: Stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris in 2010, never recovered
11. Nude with a Hat (1908)
A woman, bare to the waist, wears a wide dark hat. The paint is heavy and rough, laid on in thick strokes, with none of the stretched necks and smooth faces that people now expect from Modigliani. In the museum in Haifa where it hangs, the canvas is placed so that its back can be seen as well.