Jeanne Modigliani

Jeanne Modigliani (29 November 1918 – 27 July 1984)^[1] was the biographer of her father, artist Amedeo Modigliani, writing the 1958 book Modigliani, man and myth, later translated into English from the Italian by Esther Rowland Clifford.^[2]

Her father, Amedeo Modigliani, was an Italian-Jewish artist who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterised by mask-like faces and elongation of form. He died in 1920 of tubercular meningitis, exacerbated by poverty, overwork, and addiction to alcohol and narcotics.

Her mother, Jeanne Hébuterne, was a French artist, best known as her father's frequent subject and common-law wife. When Modigliani died, twenty-one-year-old Hébuterne was eight months pregnant with their second child. A day after Modigliani's death, Hébuterne was taken to her parents' home. There, inconsolable, she threw herself out of a fifth-floor window, killing herself and her unborn child.

After her parents' deaths when she was fourteen months old, young Jeanne was brought to Italy and cared for by her maternal grandparents until her paternal aunt adopted her in the Modigliani hometown of Livorno, where she spent her childhood. She then graduated in art history in Florence.^[3]

Jeanne married Italian economist and journalist Mario Cesare Silvio Levi. She later was identified and persecuted as a Jew by the fascists, fleeing to Paris.^[4] During World War II, she participated in the French Resistance. During this time she met another Resistance fighter, Valdemar "Valdi" Nechtschein, who was also married. They began an affair, and in May 1946, Jeanne gave birth to their daughter, Anne. Eventually, both divorced their spouses and married one another. Their second daughter together, Laure, was born in 1951.

Jeanne and Nachtschein divorced in 1980.

Following a fall that caused a cerebral hemorrhage, Jeanne died in a Paris hospital in 1984.

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