Amedeo Modigliani was considered the quintessential bohemian artist—his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In this major new biography Meryle Secrest writes about his upbringing as a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished genteel Italian family; his move to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks; his training as an artist, learning everything from painting, drawing, and sculpture to nude studies and landscapes; his influences and his long-kept secret illness of tuberculosis and the crucial ways it affected his life and work. Here is Modigliani, the man and the artist, his life in the streets, and the Paris in which he lived, a city of boundless opportunity; and the world of art and artists then in the passionate embrace of aesthetic revolution.

The Washington Ideas Roundtable Series is made possible with the generous support of Michelle Smith and the Robert H. Smith Family Foundation. 

Amedeo Modigliani was considered the quintessential bohemian artist—his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In this major new biography Meryle Secrest writes about his upbringing as a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished genteel Italian family; his move to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks; his training as an artist, learning everything from painting, drawing, and sculpture to nude studies and landscapes; his influences and his long-kept secret illness of tuberculosis and the crucial ways it affected his life and work.