No one need mourn Modigliani
Something like Sting and his Police did for punk, Amedeo Modigliani made modern art, if not cubism itself, safe for home consumption, sculpting faces into razor-edged African distortions without being scary about it. The classical elegance remained evident. He was standing at cubism’s door but refused to go inside. Gregarious, likeable, handsome and a flash dresser, he got distracted and dismantled. He was consumed, and in death from consumption, he was nearly consumed by myth.
Charges of decorum seem odd when applied to someone as wrecked on booze and dope as he was. When a worried neighbour broke into his squalid Paris flat on a freezing January morning in 1920, there lay the once brash Modigliani, all of 35, about to die from tuberculosis in a bed littered with empty liquor bottles.
His mistress Jeanne Hebuterne, clearing away the stack of sardine tins, admitted she hadn’t thought to call a doctor. Amedeo, who’d been scraped up reeking from a pavement, taken to hospital and then shipped home with a shrug, died on the 24th, as if according to script. (This isn’t Jeanne, it’s “Portrait of Madame Zborowska”, from 1917.)
Two days later Jeanne threw herself out a window, nine months pregnant with their second child. It was a while before his family let her be buried next to him in the posh grave his high-office brother bought for Modi at Pere Lachaise, where hundreds of friends and admirers had gathered to see him off. See the rest.

Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) lived and sculpted at 54 Rue de Montparnasse. The Romanian had been a studio assistant to Auguste Rodin but ventured far into stylisation with such breathtaking works as “Bird in Space”, which US Customs would only admit as an industrial item (a propeller, officials thought), not art. The case went to trial: It was art.
His first studio was at 5 Rue Delambre, initially the apartment of his wife Fernande Barrey, and from there he became an exceedingly popular artist in the 1920s, even winning the Order of Belgium and Legion of Honour.
The Auberge de la Bonne Franquette at the corner of Rue des Saules and Rue Saint Rustique was called Aux Billards en Bois in the 1890s, when Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Monet and Zola were among the clientele. The owners still take pride in the fact that Van Gogh painted its garden in “La Guinguette” in 1886.
The great Renoir – whose “Seated Female Nude”, also known as “After the Bath”, is seen here – was among those who had their own designated tables in the huge, three-storey restaurant. Monet and Pissarro would hover around his, trying to muster the courage to speak to him. 
Where everybody knows your name: Fernand Leger comes to grips with Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso while Henri Matisse and Georges Braque wisely look for hiding places.
The gendarmes were summoned more than once to 21 Avenue du Maine, seen here in a Google Earth view, most memorably one night in January 1917 when they had a party there for Georges Braque, who’d just been drummed out of the military on account of having a hole in him. 





