Modigliani at the Phillips Collection

With nearly 100 paintings, drawings and sculpture, this exhibition also sheds fascinating light on Modigliani's contributions to European modernism and the role his Italian Jewish heritage played in the evolution of his idiosyncratic style.

As Phillips' director Jay Gates observes, the exhibition offers a "chance to see this beautiful body of work and reflect upon the cultural and intellectual heritage that profoundly informed Modigliani's art." Chief curator Eliza Rathbone adds, "By recognizing all the influences and cultures that he drew upon, we can bring new insight to bear on his accomplishments, his legacy to Twentieth Century portraiture and the compassion for humanity expressed in his work."

A native of Livorno, Modigliani grew up in a rare Italian city with no Jewish ghetto. His family was educated, intellectual and philosophically liberal. Encouraged by his mother, he studied Italy's artistic treasures and trained in Florence.

In 1906, in the wake of the notorious Dreyfus affair, he arrived in Paris, where he spent the last 14 years of his life. In addition to encountering anti-Semitism for the first time, he found that his Italian Sephardic background set him apart from other foreign-born Jewish artists in the Circle of Montparnasse.

Russian-born Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine, for example, were identified as Jews first and Russians second. By contrast, Modigliani, who was religiously nonobservant, spoke fluent French and looked Latin, was taken for an Italian gentile. He took to introducing himself by saying, "I am Modigliani, a Jew."

He cut a dashing figure in his early years in Paris. "I was fascinated by his...handsome appearance; he looked aristocratic even in his worn out corduroys," recalled his friend, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. "Looking at his handsome likeness, it is not difficult to understand that women were so crazy about him."

Those rakish good looks, bohemian lifestyle that included lots of booze and drugs, and the aura of tragedy surrounding Modigliani - including his own early death and the suicides of two of his lovers - made him the stuff of romantic myths. For some time after he died, he was portrayed as the quintessential peintre maudit ("cursed artist"), a handsome womanizer consumed by alcohol and drugs, who died young, poor and unknown.

Scholarship over the last half century, some perceptive exhibitions and several thoughtful biographies have done much to present a more accurate picture of this gifted, complex artist. These new materials and fresh insights reveal Modigliani to have been a serious, ambitious artist whose work had intellectual underpinnings, and who was widely known in his lifetime.

These efforts, writes University of Maryland art historian Maurice Berger in the exhibition catalog, "undo the effects of decades of hyperbole, stereotypes and sensationalism by reinstating the intellectual, philosophical, spiritual and social concerns that shaped Modigliani's life and art. They paint a picture of an artist much like the most progressive colleagues in the avant-garde, someone who was driven by ideological and philosophical concerns, a man in continual dialogue with progressive culture and ideas."

"Modigliani: Beyond the Myth" is organized chronologically, permitting viewers to track the artist's development from period to period and to witness the continuous interplay between his work and various mediums. The configuration of the Phillips's newly renovated Goh Annex galleries invites visitors to compare youthful and mature Modiglianis with a swivel of the head.

When he first arrived in Paris, Modigliani thought of himself as primarily a sculptor. Even after he turned to full-time painting, he continued to think, draw and paint as a sculptor. By the time he met the great Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi in 1909 and embarked on his brief career (1910-1914) as a direct carver in stone, Modigliani had begun to evolve his own style.

His explorations of rugged, "depersonalized" human heads represented a highly personalized synthesis of African masks, European medieval elongation, Greek purity of form and Brancusi's simplification. Modigliani's "Head" (1911-12) exemplifies the bold manner in which he mixed the historical and the modernist in stone.

He stopped making sculpture in 1915, due to difficulties attendant to the outbreak of World War I, the cost of stone and his failing health. But his experiments with abstracting the face in stone deeply influenced his explorations of how that modernist approach could be applied to painted portraits.

The likenesses that followed - deceptively simple, geometric, stylized forms - convey the individual personality of each sitter. To this day, these portraits remain enigmatic - and appealing.

An entire gallery is devoted to Modigliani's pivotal series of female figures supporting architecture - caryatids. He saw these drawings as a preliminary to sculptures that would form columns framing a "Temple of Beauty."

A highlight here is the lush "Rose Caryatid," 1914, from the collection of the Norton Museum of Art. This gouache and crayon on paper reflects the profound influence of Brancusi in reducing the figure to basic elements of form, including the elegant and simple outlines of the oval head, eyes and nose. Focusing on the essence of real, curvaceous, classical female forms, the caryatid presages the sensuousness of Modigliani's late paintings of female nudes.

Around 1915 he began to paint portraits of artists, writers and critics in the creative community of Paris. These likenesses are characterized by elegantly attenuated features on stylized, masklike heads, painted in vivid colors. Sensitively rendered, they capture specific personalities, eccentricities and foibles.

Modigliani's approach to portrait painting was eccentric, although not unique. In 1916, Lipchitz asked him to create a likeness of himself and his new wife. (Owned by The Art Institute of Chicago, it is not included in the show.) "My price is ten francs a sitting and a little alcohol, you know," Lipchitz recalled Modigliani saying. He worked quietly during posing, "interrupting only now and then to take a gulp of alcohol from the bottle standing nearby," Lipchitz recounted. A delicate pencil portrait of Lipchitz in the exhibition captures the sculptor's strong, confident personality.

One of Modigliani's major lovers, Beatrice Hastings, was the subject of several portraits, often in different guises. This Englishwoman, a writer and proponent of progressive causes, for a time served as the painter's muse and multifaceted model. In "Beatrice Hastings in Front of a Door," 1915, she appears, writes Berger in the catalog, "as a Christian icon situated in front of the cruciform panels of a door." In "Madam Pompadour," 1915, she appears as Madam de Pompadour, the infamous mistress of King Louis XV, albeit with a modernized, British look.

Modigliani's portraits of his other young, ill-fated lover and mother of their child, Jeanne Hebuterne, are even more familiar. In one, her blue eyes are emphasized. Her angular form, clothed in a yellow sweater, is featured in another. In a third, from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Jeanne Hebuterne," 1919, she is depicted a year before his and her deaths.

Also memorable is The Phillips Collection's own "Elena Povolozky," 1917, a likeness characterized by elegant line and melancholy spirit implemented by the masterful technique Modigliani had developed by then. "The cool palette and strong plastic modeling of the face through color modulation signal Modigliani's mastery of the lessons of [Paul] Cézanne; the mood of wistful sadness, characteristic of the late paintings, shows him at the height of his powers," art historian Leslie Furth has observed.

Povolozky was a French artist married to a Russian émigré gallery owner. A loyal, generous friend to Modigliani and Soutine, she gave them food and money in times of need. In return, Modigliani gave her this portrait.

The painter's portraits of his friend and dealer, Polish-born Leopold Zborowski, 1918 and 1919, suggest the sitter's stern but empathetic manner. Reflecting Modigliani's appreciation for his faithful support, Zborowski comes across in the earlier likeness as "a saintly figure, replete with halo,...as unquestionable as a sunlit Byzantine mosaic, after which it is styled," writes curator Klein in the catalog.

Modigliani's portrait of another friend of Polish descent, "Lunia Czechowska (La femme à l'éventail)," 1919, is a quintessential Modigliani likeness. With her extra long neck, angular face, wan expression and sloping shoulders, set against a neutral background, this is unmistakably by Modigliani.

Equally compelling are "Seated Man with Orange Background," 1919, and "Young Woman of the People." The latter is a particularly intriguing rendering of a Parisian type.

Arguably Modigliani's best-known paintings, his reclining nudes, mainly depict professional models. His flowing line and careful attention to flesh tones blend tradition and modernism.

Often painting from a perspective above the nude figure, this series suggests the subjects' sexual availability to the artist - and male viewers. Their anatomical explicitness, blatant sexuality and flirtatious expressions, conveyed in ravishing, rich color, are provocative to this day.

When one of these nudes was displayed in the window of a Paris gallery in 1919, the police deemed it obscene and temporarily closed the show. The scandal was a publicity coup for Modigliani and boosted sales of his work.

Debilitated by drugs, drink and tuberculosis, Modigliani literally wasted away toward the end. He refused to see a doctor, insisting that only his live-in lover, Hebuterne, look after him. Just as she was about to give birth to their second child, Modigliani was taken to the hospital, where he soon died of tubercular meningitis. The next day, Hebuterne threw herself out of a fifth-story window to her death.

A few days later, a large group of mourners, including such prominent artists as Brancusi, Derain, Léger, Lipchitz, Picasso, Severini, Soutine and Blaminck, followed Modigliani's coffin to Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. There was a widespread sense that Montparnasse had lost a special person.

In the wake of this fine exhibition and informative catalog the question remains, what are we to make of such a promising life and oeuvre, truncated by the artist's dissolute ways? Perhaps Modigliani's friend Lipchitz had the definitive last word:

"Compared with the life of a Titian or a Michelangelo, Modigliani's life was a brief flash of brilliance. Would he have painted as well if he had lived a different kind of life, less dissipated and more disciplined? I do not know. He was aware of his gifts, but the way he lived was in no way an accident. It was his choice...[A]though he died so young, he accomplished what he wanted. He said to me time and again that he wanted a short but intense life - 'une vie brève mais intense.'"

The 241-page exhibition catalog, with many color illustrations and historical photographs, includes valuable chapters by Klein, Berger and others, plus a useful chronology and bibliography. Co-published by The Jewish Museum and Yale University Press, it sells for $50 (hardcover) and $34.95 (softcover).

Among the public programs relating to the exhibition is a lecture by organizing curator Klein titled "Modigliani Reconsidered." It is co-sponsored by The Phillips and the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center, and will take place in the latter's auditorium at 1529 16th Street NW, on Tuesday, April 12, at 6:30 pm. To register, call 202-387-3036 or email membership@phillipscollection.org.

The Phillips Collection is at 1600 21st Street, NW at Massachusetts Avenue, just off Dupont Circle. For information, 202-387-2151 or www.phillipscollection.org.