Like Van Gogh, Kahlo and Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani is instantly recognisable. His portraits and nudes are bound together by a style that elongates the face and turns women's bodies into arrangements of smooth, curved lines. Captivating, intimate, melancholic and strange, his works are celebrated around the world. It wasn't always that way.
In December 1917 a display of his nudes, his first and only solo exhibition, caused a stir at the Paris gallery where it hung. The story goes that a suggestion of pubic hair in one or two paintings led to public outrage. The police removed the offending works, in effect demanding that the exhibition be censored before it could continue. One century on, the Tate Modern has assembled the largest collection of his works ever displayed in the UK, including 12 of his finest nudes, pubic hair and all.
The curator, Nancy Ireson, has spoken of the importance of the work: "They have this amazing sensuality, and yet at the same time they tell us about a very strong moment in time for young women. Women's history was changing." Look at the period in which they were made and it's not hard to see her point.
Modigliani's women
Modigliani was born in Livorno, Italy, in 1884. In 1906 he moved to Paris, desperate to surround himself with other modern painters and become a great artist. By 1920 he was dead at 35, his life cut short by tuberculosis and alcohol addiction. In that short time he produced hundreds of paintings and sculptures against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world.
The First World War wiped out a generation of young men, and women entered the workforce in huge numbers for the first time. By 1920 women in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, among others, had won the right to vote. Hemlines had crept up, and tight, structured dresses had gone out of fashion. European women were in the midst of a huge transition.
It is possible to look at Modigliani's nudes, with their passive, doe-eyed expressions, immaculate skin and hourglass figures, as a classic example of the male gaze. Yet, as Ireson points out, this was a key time for young women. There is something political about these images: an open celebration of female sexuality that was too shocking for some viewers at the time. Ireson also notes that his models clearly made "choices of hairstyle and makeup which [were] quite bold for the time." Perhaps they weren't the passive dolls we might take them to be.
Modigliani also went in a different direction from his Italian contemporaries. Around the time he arrived in Paris, Futurism was emerging among Italian writers and artists. Concerned with technology, industry, progress, violence and machismo, it made no room for women or the female form.
Indeed, as referenced here, the Futurists, many of whom went on to align themselves with Fascism, denounced the nude that Modigliani would champion: "We fight against the nude in painting, as nauseous and as tedious as adultery in literature." Modigliani pushed back against a movement that celebrated all things masculine, and produced works that still beguile viewers today.
The Tate retrospective
For lovers of Modigliani, or anyone who would like to know him better, tickets to the exhibition would make a good Christmas present. The show runs until April 2018 and includes more than 100 works.
Among them are "Female Nude" (1916) and two of his famous "Reclining Nudes", from 1917 and 1919. There are also several sculptures made between 1911 and 1912. Less well known than the paintings, they are just as hauntingly beautiful, recalling both his own portraits and the distorted features of ancient tribal masks.
The exhibition has had a glowing five-star write-up in The Independent and has prompted opinion pieces on Modigliani's legacy across the British press. It looks likely to be very popular, so get there early.
Bring Modigliani into your home
A trip to the Tate Modern isn't easy for everybody, but you can still enjoy Modigliani from afar. The Tate Modern art shop sells high-quality prints inspired by the exhibition.
Once your print arrives, we can make a frame and mount to fit it. Visit this page, enter the dimensions of your print and design your frame. We dispatch within three days, so you could be hanging your own Modigliani in time for Christmas.
And if you can't get to London, there are plenty of exhibitions around the country. Browse a list of what's on over the next few months here.