Amedeo Modigliani

​​Amedeo Modigliani arrived in Paris in the fall of 1906. Ambitious, handsome, and charismatic, the twenty-two-year-old avoided the more expensive yet prestigious neighborhoods like the Latin Quarter and settled in Montmartre. In the early 1900s, this neighborhood was outside city limits and free of city taxes. Its open wastelands and numerous small vineyards, some of which still exist, were filled with inexpensive eateries and cabarets such as the Moulin Rouge, Le Chat Noir, and Le Lapin Agile. The village’s shacks, rundown wooden homes, and makeshift gardens were left largely untouched by Baron Haussmann’s ambitious plans for the city’s urbanization and reconstruction.
     Downtown Paris had maintained its fin de siècle splendor and was hailed as a jewel of modern Europe. The Eiffel Tower was the capital’s emblem. In its shadow, almost three million inhabitants roamed through one thousand kilometers of small streets, alleys, and boulevards lined with ten thousand lampposts, half a million electric lights and dozens of art nouveau subway entrances. With an increasing number of foreign artists, writers, and intellectuals streaming into a city already famous for its history and physical beauty, Paris was the cultural center of the western world.
     Modigliani was a veritable street artist of his times. He sketched constantly, but he also drank absinthe. With an alcohol content as high as ninety percent, this sweet, tasting emerald-green liquor known as la fée verte (the green fairy), was popular since the 1870s. Absinthe’s bitter, licorice-like taste and reported effects of euphoria without drunkenness were caused by mixing wormwood, a plant used for medicinal purposes since 3000 B.C., with alcohol. The young Italian bourgeois painter soon became a rebellious bohemian who could be seen staggering drunkenly from place to place with Montmartre native and fellow artist, Maurice Utrillo. He bartered sketches for a glass of wine or a meal. He gave drawings to friends and acquaintances who did not keep them, traded paintings for rent, and had a tendency, unless restrained, to remove his clothes when drunk.
            Learn more about Modigliani’s legend, but also how his life was affected by love, illness, the events of the Great War (1914-1918) in Colt’s new book, Becoming Modigliani.

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