![]() Towards the end of his brief and turbulent life, but his fame by now firmly established, Modigliani painted the 14-year-old housemaid of his dealer Léopold Zborowski. ![]() ![]() Not one to distinguish the way he painted ordinary members of society from his wealthier sitters, the Italian artist “could never forget his interest in people, and he painted them, so to say, with abandon, urged on by the intensity of his feeling and vision,” according to his friend and Cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. Modern beauty was best epitomised by Modigliani’s emotionally intense portraits, in particular the masterpiece Paulette Jourdain (c.1919). Musing upon the new spirit of the modernist age in Les Peintres Cubistes Méditations esthétiques (1913), the legendary French art critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire remarked: This vanguard of modernism was rooted in the artistic ferment of the École de Paris émigré community, gathered in the cafés, salons, studios, galleries of Montparnasse – who counted amongst their number Amedeo Modigliani, René Magritte and Léonard Tsugouharu Foujita. Whilst beauty in the early 19th century Western tradition was equated with the writhing nudes of Delacroix and Ingres’s coquettish odalisques, what followed was a shockingly explicit riposte, from Courbet’s audacious L’Origine du monde (1866), which stripped the trope away to its fundamentals, to Degas’s poetic portraits of wearied women going about their ordinary lives. The rise of European modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a radical transformation in this tradition. Ivine, modest, perfection, fleshy, uninhibited: the female body has been represented in innumerable ways over the millennia.
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