Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) was an Italian painter and sculptor of the École de Paris who worked mainly in France. He is known for his portraits and nudes in a modern style characterised by a surreal elongation of faces, necks, and figures—works that were not well received during his lifetime but later became highly sought after. Modigliani spent his youth in Italy, where he studied the art of antiquity and the Renaissance.

In 1906, he moved to Paris, where he came into contact with such artists as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. During his first year in Paris, Modigliani devoted himself intensively to life drawing at various academies. By 1908, his work began to take on a more Impressionistic quality, capturing scenes observed on the streets, in the circus, and at the cabaret. Around 1910, as he fully established his distinctive style, his drawing became closely intertwined with his painting and sculpture, laying the groundwork for his large reclining nudes, portraits of friends, collectors, models, and fellow artists, as well as terracotta and marble heads and caryatids.

In his work, nudes displayed Modigliani’s greatest originality in composition, following in the footsteps of Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who freely experimented with cropping, bird’s-eye or low-angle views, oblique perspectives, and distortions.

By 1912, Modigliani was exhibiting highly stylised sculptures alongside Cubists of the Section d'Or group at the Salon d’Automne. Modigliani’s oeuvre includes paintings and drawings. From 1909 to 1914, he devoted himself mainly to sculpture. His main subjects were portraits and full figures, both in images and in the sculpture. Modigliani had little success while alive but after his death achieved great popularity. He died of tubercular meningitis, at the age of 35, in Paris.