Modigliani and Livorno
This exhibition has an historical value for the city of Livorno. The adjective does not seem excessive, because history works in such a way as to arrange appointments that we should have the courage to attend. The Centenary of Modigliani's death is one of these. Or rather, it is an event we cannot fail to observe. The value of this exhibition is therefore much more significant than a celebration. It serves to welcome back Amedeo Modigliani, "Dedo", to the city where he was born and raised. But it also helps put an end to that long misunderstanding, rooted in the waste of a romanticism of begging and false legend, which distorted, to the point of making it unrecognisable, the profound relationship between Livorno and the son who was destined to become the most extraordinary painter of the twentieth century.
We believe that the city that had remained in the eyes and in the heart of Modigliani was made of a precise light. Of street views, of childhood friends, of schoolmates. Of a specific Jewish-Sephardic spirituality and of vivid family memories. Of the many things that, starting with this exhibition, will finally be told as part of a single story, which will nevertheless continue to reverberate in the present. Meanwhile, I like to remember that, in the very years in which Modigliani left an indelible mark on the history of painting, the poet Reiner Maria Rilke, with impressive precision, described childhood as the time when "we were filled to the brim with figures".
To explain, in short, that those figures are precisely those in which we last for a lifetime. So whether we live our lives in a provincial city, which has, however, a history of extraordinary cosmopolitan modernity, or whether we leave to amaze the world in an artist's studio in Montparnasse, that fullness of images in which we were born and raised is destined to determine our gaze forever. And that gaze returns here to its origins today.
Simone Lenzi, Councillor for Culture, Municipality of Livorno
(From the exhibition catalogue, “Modigliani e l’avventura di Montparnasse. Capolavori dalle collezioni Netter e Alexandre” (Modigliani and the Montparnasse adventure. Masterpieces from the Netter and Alexandre collections). Published by Sillabe)
