Modigliani: Modern Gazes

For a long time, the development of modern art was described as a path to abstraction. In contrast, the multitude of artist groups, their manifestos, but also the exhibitions at the beginning of the 20th century testify to an equal perception of different positions by contemporaries. Throughout Europe there were artists who continued to work on figuration in parallel with the innovation brought about by Cubism and Expressionism. Their intense preoccupation with portraiture and the nude was just as provocative as the dissolution of form.

It was not until the traumas of the First World War that a cult of coolness emerged in European painting of the 1920s. The zeitgeist, later called New Objectivity, was also shaped by women writers, fashion designers and painters. With short hairstyles and masculine clothing, some of them were fashionably ahead of their time and lived emancipation. The women of this time, associated as modern bourgeois, had already met Modigliani in the circle of the Parisian avant-garde. Encouraged as a child by his mother and aunt, who taught languages and were literate, Modigliani sought out the proximity of intellectual and musically educated women before and after the First World War, who explored new scope in Parisian artistic life. Modigliani transferred reflections of these relationships to his paintings, portraying both sexes of the Parisian avant-garde as cosmopolitan artist friends across borders. The stoic nobility of his portraits anticipated the New Objectivity. Modigliani depicted the new image of man without expressive tendencies, yet portrayed the emancipated woman without the cold detachment of New Objectivity or the dissecting view of postwar society. Modigliani even reduced references to the sitter's social background to a minimum. His portraits of women and nudes showed the self-confident matter-of-factness of a femme moderne.
 

The exhibition Modigliani: Modern Gazes brings together fifty-six of Modigliani’s portraits and nudes in dialogue with thirty-three paintings, drawings, and sculptures by artists such as Gustav Klimt, Jeanne Mammen, Pablo Picasso, Natalia Goncharova, Egon Schiele, and Paula  Modersohn-Becker. International lenders include the Albertina, Vienna, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, the Nahmad Collection, the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, the Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, the Tate, London, the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

An exhibition of the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, under the patronage of the Embassy of the Italian Republic in Germany.

The exhibition at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart will be on view from November 24, 2023 to April 1, 2024.

Cover image: Amedeo Modigliani: Reclining Nude (on the Left Side) (detail), 1917 © Nahmad Collection