Modigliani revealed

Modigliani's 'Tête de Femme,' 1915, Pinacothèque de Brera, Milan

This recent sale highlights the current popularity of the Italian artist, whose death at the age 35 has meant that his works are scarce and highly sought after when they come up for auction.

It also makes the exhibition of Modigliani's work in the L'Annonciade in Saint-Tropez this summer all the more remarkable and keenly anticipated. Obtaining works by the Italian master, who was born in Livorno in 1884, is notoriously difficult; loans often impossible. So this new exhibition has had to work around constraints to enhance various aspects of the artist's work for the viewer. This has led the museum to a focus on his drawings and graphic works, which are often overlooked when taken next to his paintings and sculp-tures but which are essential to his body of work as a whole. There are also a small number of his paintings on display, which are very much in the Modigliani style we are now accustomed to seeing.

This show promises to have a revelatory quality that, paradoxically in the modern world, doesn't delve into the personal scandals - the desperately handsome, brooding artist and his love affairs, substance abuse and tragic spiral towards untimely death - but rather places the focus on the work and what that can, in turn, tell us about the man.

HM

Musée de l’Annonciade, 3rd July to the 18th October

In next month's RT: a focus on the life and work of Amedeo Modigliani, one of the Twentieth Century most tragic and seductive artists.