Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani was born in Livorno in 1884 and moved to Paris in 1906, settling among the painters and poets of Montmartre and then Montparnasse. From about 1909 to 1914 he mostly carved: tall stone heads, made with Constantin Brâncuși's encouragement, that draw on African, Egyptian and Cycladic sculpture.

When he went back to painting he kept that simplification. His sitters, among them Chaïm Soutine, Jean Cocteau and his companion Jeanne Hébuterne, are stretched into long ovals and columns and set against plain grounds in a few warm colours, with eyes often left unpainted. The reclining nudes of 1916–19 follow the same line. He almost never painted landscape or still life. Ill with tuberculosis for much of his life, he died in Paris in January 1920, aged thirty-five.