Join our Art & Coffee discussion group
on Friday 14th April, 11.30am (for about an hour)
at The Beaumont, Barchester Southgate Community Care
15, Cannon Hill, N14 7DJ
for “Amadeo Modigliani & Anna Akhmatova, Paris 1910”
Amadeo Modigliani (1884-1920), the Italian sculptor and painter, had moved to Paris in 1906.
Anna Akhmatova, Russian poet of the Silver Age, first met Modigliani in Paris in 1910 (with her new husband who thought the artist a “monster”).
Modigliani (1884–1920) in his studio rue de la Grande-Chaumière, at Montparnasse; unknown photographer, c.1918.
Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) photographed by Moisei Nappelbaum, 1926.
A year later Akhmatova returned to Paris (alone) and together with Modigliani wandered the Luxembourg Gardens, talking and reciting poetry. Their “affair” lasted no more than three months, yet as Richard Nathanson (a curator for the Estorick’s Modigliani exhibition in 2015) put it in an interview with Lucy Davies [Telegraph]:
“Meeting her changed his art profoundly… Beyond the beauty of the individual works themselves, the particular fascination of this exhibition lies in the way it gradually reveals the emergence of Modigliani’s characteristically concise and elegant vocabulary, and how much that vocabulary had to do with Anna Akhmatova.”
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Today we’ll explore the art and poetry of Modigliani and Akhmatova’s Paris.
All welcome!
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thecommonviewer 