… Midnight, Montmartre and Modigliani

H. P. Hugh, 1899

Charles The-Flowers-of-Evil Baudelaire was 19th-century Paris' archetypal artiste maudit - the tortured, sensitive, cursed poet of a dead city that had crossed in a single generation from the Middle Ages into the modern age. He lived intensely and died young, his work imbued with a deep melancholy that resonates to this day. In many ways, the Franco-Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani picked up in the early 1900s where Baudelaire had left off. It was a dubious honor, perhaps, but Modigliani's soulful artwork, like Baudelaire's poetry, is more coveted than ever, and the story of his tumultuous, debauched, tragically short life in Paris is as moving today as it was a century ago.

A puritanical biographer of our current age might describe Modigliani as macho, womanizing, obsessive and demonic, a substance-abusing madman too handsome and talented for his own good, at once self-destructive and murderous, a kind of proto-Jim Morrison of The Doors, a rebel without a cause, the last of the great Bohemian Romantics of the Belle Époque….