ABSTRACT
The exhibition of paintings by Amadeo Modigliani, at the Acquavella Galleries, a benefit for the Museum of Modern Art, comes to us exactly twenty years after the museum's own large retrospective survey of the subject. Modigliani came to Paris from his native Italy in 1906, the year of Cezanne's death. Modigliani's relation to Cezanne is more than an idle fact about history; it signifies something essential about the quality of his art, and about its limitations. What touches us so directly in Modigliani's painting is precisely this openness of feeling, this empathy that could be at once so sympathetic, and so clear-eyed, and the almost matter-of-fact classical balance with which this ready emotional generosity is transmuted into a flawless pictorial structure. Modigliani is closer to his friend Chaim Soutine than to the avant-garde leaders of the School of Paris. Modigliani one of the "little masters" of the School of Paris, not one of its leaders.
