Amedeo Modigliani was one of the first artists, beyond my teenage infatuation with Surrealism, that led me into an appreciation for modern art. (I should make a caveat that my appreciation for modernism is largely concentrated in the first half of the 20th Century, before the boring postwar theorists elected themselves the raison d’être for visual art.)

I stumbled across Modigliani’s work while thumbing through art books in the school library, and immediately hunted down an inexpensive paperback of his work at the local bookstore. There was just some innate charm about the freedom with which he distorts the faces and figures, drawing them out with an almost cartoon-like sensibility, that captured my attention.

His brash colors and large graphic shapes filled with texture add to the appeal, making a fascinating visual soup of lines, colors and forms. Modigliani’s figures lean and twist, their geometry askew as though gravity has shifted to an an angle off of perpendicular. His faces are sometimes perched atop elongated necks, as if striving to be taller, and are often tilted to one side in some quizzical inflection.

His geometrically distilled portraits and languorous nudes project a warmth and humanity that is often lacking in the work of many of the other modern painters, who seemed to be striving to remove those characteristics from their angular collisions of shapes and colors.

Modigliani was friends with Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who sparked his interest in sculpture and introduced him to the primal appeal of African masks, which would greatly influence his work.,

Modigliani’s charms were wasted on the art patrons of the time, even those interested in the other emerging modern painters. His work became very popular years after it was too late to do anyone but the gallery owners any good.

Sadly, Modigliani lived the tragic, falsely romanticized life of the “starving artist”. So charming and romantic was this lifestyle that the desperation and shame of his poverty, along with bouts of chronic illness, drove him to be consumed by drink and drugs in addition to the tuberculosis that cut short his life in 1920 at the age of 35.

The Royal Academy of Arts in London, UK has just mounted the first major exhibition of his work in forty plus years: “Modigliani and His Models“, which runs from July 6 to October 15, 2006. There is also a book associated with the exhibit, Modigliani and His Models by Emily Braun, Kenneth Silver, Simonetta Fraquelli and Kenneth Wayne, but it hasn’t been released in the US yet. Modigliani is well represented in art publishing, though, and you’ll find numerous titles in bookstores.

Taks a look through Modigliani’s portraits and figures and you’ll see the source for much of the stylization in the 50’s and 60’s animators and the current crop of retro-sixties-modern animators and illustrators. At the very least, you may get a different slant on things.

Link via Art Knowledge News.

It’s hard to get to the National Portrait Gallery.

Not because it’s remote, at least for those of us on the east coast of the US. Like most of the museums associated with the Smithsonian, the National Portrait Gallery is conveniently located in central Washington, D.C. (a few blocks north of the Mall at Eighth & F Streets).

It’s difficult to get to the NPG because it’s too conveniently located in the midst of Washington’s cornucopia of stupendous galleries and museums.

The National Gallery of Art alone is enough to dazzle you for days on end with it’s fantastic collection. Add in the Hirshorn Museum of modern and contemporary art and the Freer and Sackler Galleries with their stunning collections of American, Near Eastern and Far Eastern art, and you have an art overload that can keep the art lobe of your brain stupefied for weeks. (Add in the other fantastic museums on and around the mall and you have what should be thought of as the nation’s cultural Disneyland.)

So the National Portrait Gallery often gets overlooked, partly from being lost in the cultural overload and partly because it conjures up images of dark canvasses of presidents and Secretaries of the Interior in stiff poses, with dour expressions on their civil servant faces, leaning on wooden desks in gloomy paneled rooms.

While the aforementioned dark portraits are there, so are dazzling contemporary portraits and changing exhibits, and the museum is augmented by its presence in the same building with the American Art Museum.

Now is a great time to discover these museums because they’re back, bigger and better than ever, after being closed for a six-year renovation of the Patent Office Building, which houses both museums. The galleries’ collections are on display in a vastly improved and expanded display space collectively called the Renyolds Center.

Even though the building renovations are complete, the web site is still not filled out in many places, but you can explore a few exhibits, like the Portrait Competition below and some special features like an interactive feature on Gilbert Stewart’s famous full-length portrait of the US of A’s dear old dad, the real George W (image above, top left).

One of the 14 exhibitions with which the museum reopened on July 1 of this year is the winners of the Outwin Soochever 2006 Portrait Competition, which runs until February 19 of 2007 (image above, clockwise from Gilbert Stewart’s portrait of GW at top left: Kris Kuksi, James Seward, Sarah Sohn, Will Wilson, Chris Campbell, Armando Dominguez and Laura Karetzky).