I don't know when this photo of the artist Amedeo Modigliani was actually taken but he died in January 1920 so that helps to put it in a time-frame. Perhaps what's getting to me about it is that it just looks so contemporary... somehow it's not like most other images you see from the early 1900s. His relaxed pose, his clothing and the background just make me feel as if I've stepped into his studio and seen him sitting there like that in the last few minutes. I'm touched by Modigliani's personal story anyway, his much talked about use of drugs and alcohol being believed to have been exacerbated by the need to suppress and disguise the symptoms of the TB that eventually killed him at the age of 35. I'm moved by the tale of his beautiful, besotted young wife, Jeanne Hébuterne, who threw herself out of a fifth-floor window soon after his death, killing herself and their baby to whom she was shortly due to give birth. And of course I love much of his work, and remember how struck I was on first seeing one particular painting on display at one of my favourite museums, the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. Full of scratchy marks and loose brush strokes, the portrait of a woman shows her with blacked out eyes, presumably influenced by the African masks he admired, but somewhat unnerving.
Up until seeing this photo of the man, the name Modigliani only conjured up boldly-coloured linear paintings of reclining nudes in my mind, but now I'm just seeing him. The jacket, the boots, the paper on the floor... and a face, a warm face, that I wish I could have known.
