Amedeo Modigliani

S- come over and we'll go through the conceptions of Monet v. Manet.

Modigliani.

Dear Lord.

Modigliani.

[laughs] What about you? Have you got ...

I was thinking of a, a housewarming gift for you-

Um, but my favorite thing about the Hustler Casino is they have, like, dupes of, like, rich guy mansion art, but it's all been sort of yassified.

And the one that I remember is that there is a, like, copy of a Modigliani painting where it's very clear [laughs] that the, um, subject has been given fake boobs.

[laughs]

[laughs]

Bernie summonses a romantic ghost, a figure who pays for dinner by signing the tablecloth.

It's that classic Modigliani archetype, the penniless romantic outsider trading art for survival, living purely on and for his work.

And then Bernie admits, it's so hard to hold on to the ghost of your breed, it takes ambition to call the colours you need, with a touch of self-awareness, because it's hard to keep hold of that hungry, reckless spirit when you're no longer 18 and freezing in a basement flat.

This is the perennial dilemma of Bernie, the artist poet.

The Japanese above all, Hokusai, Utamaro, Hiroshige.

There were Renoir, Whistler, Monet, Van Gogh, Botticelli, Marc Chagall, Holbein, Utrillo, Leon Bakst, Memling, Seurat, Modigliani, Rousseau, Bruegel, Bosch, Van Eyck, Paul Klee, Kandinsky, and so on, ad infinitum.

Now and then I bought a print and hung it in some conspicuous place, a sure way to kill an idol.

I also wrote long letters to my cronies about my discovery of this genius or that.

Picasso gave the figure at the far left of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon the rigid stance and clenched hand of an Egyptian statue.

Modigliani's long carved heads drew on Egyptian art as well as African, Cycladic, and other ancient traditions.

Designers reached for scarabs, lotuses, and winged suns whenever they wanted something to feel expensive or erotic, mysterious or vaguely eternal.

The clearest proof that Tutankhamun did not invent this taste arrived in Hollywood on October 18th, 1922, less than three weeks before the first stair was found.

in Gueru.

And there, my grandmother gifted my mom a copy of Modigliani.

painting Alice.

And when my mom brought this, I just started drawing from Alice, you know, copying Alice.

Because if you have a feeling, if you have a connection with the pure canvas, the human canvas, you can do beautiful work.

Like Modigliani had a beautiful model with the life was full with art and life together.

So if you have a model that understands you and is professional.

I painted in Africa with a model that I say a lot of thank you to Nora, to Chinsky, and the whole opponent that called me in Africa for a project in Guinea.

The French dealer Paul Guillermo understood the power of this presentation.

Amedeo Modigliani painted Guillermo several times.

In 1915, the portrait Paul Guillermo, Novo Pilota, the dealer appears as a fashionable and self-assured figure, wearing a trilby, a tie, smoking a cigarette and looking directly towards us.

Modigliabi inscribed the words Novo Pilota, meaning new pilot.