To mark the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of Modigliani's death, is the documentary film Maverick Modigliani, that explores the life and work of Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), an avant-garde painter who became a classic contemporary artist loved and imitated all over the world.
Born in Livorno, Tuscany, Dedo or Modì, as the artist was often nicknamed, lived a short, tormented life, narrated here from an original point of view, that of his young common-law wife, Jeanne Hébuterne, who committed suicide two days after his death at the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris on 24th January 1920In this documentary film the paintings themselves speak to us, filmed in dedicated sets from "La Filette en Bleu" to the portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne. Striking a fine balance between footage of the city as it is today and black and white photos and archive footage as it was then, Jeanne's narrative voice talks to us about Paris at the turn of the century: the ville lumière, the metropolis, the centre of modernity. It was an already established art market and a magnet attracting, from all over Europe, painters and sculptors that were going hungry then, only to be worth millions today, first and foremost Modigliani himself. Moving from one makeshift lodging to the next, Amedeo Modigliani, poor, hungry, but full of enthusiasm, met an aspiring poetess, the twenty-year-old Russian, Anna Achmatova, and the English journalist and feminist Beatrice Hastings. These were the women he painted portraits of, and whose faces, almost caryatid-like, became the very icons of his art.