As far as portrait painting is concerned, his early works are more traditional, but he soon formed his own style, that is, the background of portrait became abstract. Generally speaking, a formal portrait should have a background, mostly indoor environment, which can reveal the social situation of the characters, while a portrait practice has no background, only color. Modigliani is somewhere in between. Most of his portraits are non-works, but they don't draw backgrounds. At most, it's just geometrically abstract furniture. Such background processing does not prompt the living environment and social state of the characters, which makes the characters themselves look different. This is the painter's concern for people, especially for people's inner world.
It stands to reason that human eyes can best express people's inner world, but strangely, many of Modigliani's portraits, including many fine works, do not draw eyes. Painters, like ancient Greek sculptors, regard the eyes as a plane and describe them with a single color. In fact, in our critical terminology today, Modigliani describes a gaze, an introverted self-gaze. Staring theory comes from the mirror theory of French psychologist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) in the middle of 20th century, which holds that children begin to look at themselves through the mirror, which is the beginning for people to study themselves and their relationship with the environment. By the end of the twentieth century, the cultural research theory in the post-modernism period emphasized the communication in gaze, such as gazing, peeping and eye contact, and thought that the communication of sight revealed people's social environment and survival relationship. Modigliani once said that his characters look at their inner world. I want to say that his characters are as lonely as the painter himself and only communicate with himself. Because they know nothing about the outside world, they have no eyes. The so-called blind eyes only look at their inner world. In this way, the abstract background of the characters has a reason, because the background and environment are not more important than the characters themselves. So in other paintings, even if the eyes are drawn, the eyes of the characters are vacant and empty, and there seems to be no focus. They turn a blind eye to the outside world. So I also want to say that Modigliani's abstraction is only a superficial form, and his portrait is actually his understanding of people and a portrayal of his own inner world.
Similar to portraits, Modigliani's nude figures also pursue the inner spiritual world in the abstract external form. In addition to the abstract background of some works and the blindness of some characters, the simplicity of decorative colors and the planarization of spatial modeling, as well as the improvisation of pen colors, are also a way for painters to pay attention to the characters themselves. However, the main way to achieve this goal is the painter's composition design. Modigliani's female nude paintings are mostly reclining full-body paintings. When composing a composition, the painter deliberately cut off the legs of the characters with the edges of the canvas, and some even cut off their hands and heads. Since the Renaissance in Europe, traditional figure painting, especially classical and academic figure painting, has emphasized the principle of integrity and unity, and all parts of the human body are drawn without omission as long as they are visible through perspective. This follows the perfect aesthetic theory put forward by the ancient Greek philosopher Alex Dodd. Modigliani did not follow this principle. He cut off the legs of the character, visually freed the human body from the restrictions of the frame and made it look like it was floating on the canvas, so the human body itself was highlighted. That is to say, because the picture frame no longer limits our vision, it is no longer a window for painters and audiences to observe the world, and the observed object is not far away from the window, but close to our eyes, with the characteristics of peeping nearby.
But it is precisely because of the emphasis on the characters themselves that Modigliani's nude paintings are not as rich in meaning as classical nude paintings. As a result, when he 19 17 held his only solo exhibition in Paris, his nude works were considered pornographic. Not only were none sold, but the exhibition was forcibly closed by the police. Some of Modigliani's nude paintings are erotic if they are visually intuitive, but if they are explained by today's cultural theory, it should be said that his nude paintings pay more attention to form and psychological factors. The so-called form, as mentioned above, is the flattening of pure color, the deformation of character modeling and the breakthrough of traditional aesthetic principles in composition. The so-called psychology is the interweaving and conflict between passion and indifference in the picture.
Modigliani's passion for figure painting, especially nude painting, is related to his sexual experience in real life and his love with Beatrice and Yang Ni. This passion for love and desire, under the influence of spirits and drugs, has become a solid color on the canvas through improvisation, and the characters have also been deformed and elongated, which has a special charm. On the one hand, the charm and temptation of the characters in Modigliani's novels float and stand out on the screen, implying and even revealing pent-up passion. On the other hand, because of the painter's loneliness, his characters are indifferent. These naked women either sleep with their eyes closed or meditate. They are trapped in their own inner world and completely ignore the existence of the outside world. This indifference made them lose their personality. It's all just * *, which is a reflection of the painter's own personality. This indifference not only reflects Modigliani's lonely life in Paris as a foreigner, but also reflects his mentality of not joining any art groups as a lonely artist. Once, the popular futurist painter wanted to make a declaration. The organizer wanted to ask modigliani to sign the declaration to show his support, but he refused. Loneliness makes Modigliani strange and contradictory, and his portrait is as mysterious as a riddle.