Artwords #21 theme: 'Miniature'

This is my 'Ode to Modi'

Title: "She would have given her left arm for one more day with Modi"

After seeing the movie 'Modigliani' about the life of Italian Expressionist painter

Amedeo Modigliani, I was moved to paint this little rendition of one of his most famous paintings.

(Andy Garcia 's portrayal of Modigliani is so beautiful, and so heartbreaking that I highly recommend this film to anyone with the spirit of an artist.)

This piece is painted in acrylics on a 6x6 gallery wrapped canvas. The difference between this miniature rendition and the original is that when he painted it he included her left arm...

I ommited her left arm and replaced it with her broken heart... hence the title "She would have given her left arm for one more day with Modi". What follows is the tragic story the movie was based upon...

Amedeo Modigliani was a Jewish/Italian Expressionist Painter in the early 1900's. He, like most painters back then, was poor, depressed, and on any given day either alcohol or drug abusing. He would sit in Cafe's and argue with Pablo Picasso mercilessly for hours over bottles of Absinthe. He was angry and brooding because he felt the art world didn't understand or accept him or his paintings.
When he was 33 years old he met and fell in love with a young French/Catholic Painter by the name of Jeanne Hebuterne (she was only 19 years old). They fell madly in love, and she became pregnant and bore him a daughter whom they named 'jeanne modigliani'. Her parents disowned her for being with a derelict, drunken, Jewish painter, and tried endlessly to have the child taken away from her.

As time passed Modi painted dozens of pictures of her, and when he found out she was pregnant with their second child, he asked her to marry him. As the story goes he was very sick with not only drug and alcohol related sicknesses but also Tubercular Meningitis. They believe it was the Tuberculosis which he finally succumbed to on Jan 24, 1920, and he died the very week of his largest gallery unveiling...

The most tragic part of the whole thing, is that Jeanne Hebuterne was so overcome with grief after his death, that she was whisked away back to her parents home in France. She felt she could not survive without her beloved Modigliani, and two days after Modi's death, she purposely walked backwards out of a balcony 5th floor window of her parents home, where she fell to her death taking her unborn child's life with her.

Here is a picture of the original painting if you would like to compare it with my rendition.

I hope you liked this offering... it is one of my favorites.

Until next time... Joan