Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaledition.com/i/883104
42 October 5 • 2017 jn Heading to New York City this fall? Check out a new exhibit at the Jewish Museum focusing on Modigliani's early years in Paris. M y name is Modigliani. I am Jewish." That is how the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) often introduced himself during the years he lived in Paris, where he settled in 1906 and where he remained until his death, at age 35, from tubercular meningitis. This biographical detail will probably come as a surprise to most people, who are more likely to associ- ate Modigliani with the elongated figures and stylized faces that characterize so many of his paintings than his Jewish identity. But as "Modigliani Unmasked," an exhibit that opened in September at the Jewish Museum in New York City shows, his identity as a Sephardic Jew was also central to both his personal and his artistic vision. The exhibit, which runs through Feb. 4, 2018, will showcase approximately 150 works by Modigliani, mostly from his early years in Paris and many of them never before seen in the United States. Exhibit curator Mason Klein explains that Modigliani arrived in Paris in the wake of the infa- mous Dreyfus Affair, in which Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus had been framed and falsely convicted of treason before ultimately being exonerated. But the anti-Semitism stoked by the affair remained wide- spread, as did a nationalist-driven strain of prejudice against all foreigners. These racist and anti-Jewish DIANE COLE SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS Drawing On His Jewishness e x h i b i t i o n arts&life LEFT: Lunia Czechowska, 1919, oil on canvas. ABOVE: Amedeo Modigliani, c. 1912. FACING PAGE, CLOCKWISE: Caryatid, c. 1914, limestone. Caryatid, 1914, gouache and ink on paper. La Juive (The Jewess), 1908, oil on canvas. MUSEU DE ARTE DE SÃO PAULO IMAGE PROVIDED BY PVDE / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES, NEW YORK