Revealing secrets of Modigliani

on display in Philadelphia an exhibit honoring  the genius of the Italian master Amedeo Modigliani   Serena Altschul is our guide narrow faces haunting eyes elongated  necks all well-known characteristics   of an Amedeo Modigliani masterpiece less  well-known the brains behind that brush it's not that often that you get to be in  front of a Modigliani without the glass in   front of it and without the frame yeah so there  it is Barbara Buckley is a chief conservator at   The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia where a  team of curators and conservators are using new   technologies to unearth old secrets from beneath  the canvas painting their findings are part of   an exhibition Modigliani up close one of the  really fun things was looking at some of the   early paintings where he was painting over  canvases that had already been painted upon   sometimes his own canvases sometimes campuses  that had been painted on by a different artist   Buckley found Modigliani often Incorporated  those under drawings into his finished pieces   so he's using them in really creative ways  he's allowing some of the nuances of the color   of the painting below to be integrated into the  painting on the surface one of the discoveries of   this exhibition was that Modigliani used a very  wide and varied palette of more than 20 colors   we had previously thought he only used about five  Cindy Kang is a curator with the barns she says   the artist fools the eye into thinking parts of  the figure are monochromatic you can see in her   bangs it looks like she just you know she just  has dark hair but there's pops of blue and of red   Modigliani as Italians say was born in  Livorno Italy in 1884 to an Italian Jewish   Family his parents encouraged his passion  for the Arts modigliani's mother educated   her son by taking him to visit cultural  institutions all over the country he did   have a very classical training and you can still  see that it's all very very meticulously planned in 1906 he moved to the  center of the art World Paris   he was a member of the school of Paris a group of  artists living in the city of light but he didn't   see all of his contemporaries as inspiration  but Picasso and Braque were developing cubism   they were working with collage they were really  interested in interrogating pictorial structure   Modigliani was interested in something else and  so this is why he was so dedicated to the figure   Modigliani painted and sculpted the latter  practice lasting only a few years but becoming   consequential to his method when we think  of Modigliani and his signature style it's   the faces the long necks where did that come  from you need to go back to his sculpture he   was getting his blocks from construction sites  in Paris the blocks that Modigliani was using   to sculpt heads were very long rectangular blocks  would he pay for them we don't know exactly maybe   he stole them in the cover of the night maybe  he was paying for them we don't know exactly Amedeo Modigliani died in 1920 at the age of  35 from tuberculosis and while his career may   have been fleeting his legacy was anything but is  everything that's going to be looked at looked at   oh there's always more there's more there's  always more yeah this is just the beginning

Channel: CBS Sunday Morning

Views: 67,781

Keywords: CBS Sunday Morning, CBS News, news, modigliani, barnes foundation, philadelphia, artist, amedeo modigliani, italy, modigliani up close, serena altschul

Id: 8541kuU0I8M

Length: 4min 41sec (281 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 15 2023