Modigliani Up Close is the exacting, exquisite new exhibition at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. It’s far from weedy, weepy art history, or what passes for art history today. That’s the tut-tut, grievance-bedraggled school that uses art as a launching point, if it’s concerned with art at all. Modigliani Up Close isn’t really your father’s art history, either. Gathering 50 impressive works by Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), Up Close is the rare art-conservation exhibition, or, more precisely, a study of how the artist made his paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Modigliani’s technique hasn’t been studied and presented to a wide audience to the extent the Barnes now has.
It’s the Barnes’s 100th anniversary, too. A Modigliani exhibition, and this show has both sparkle and substance, makes sense. Dr. Albert Barnes, the founder and intellectual czar of the foundation, and the art world’s bête noire, owned more than a dozen choice Modigliani paintings, all acquired in his early days of collecting.
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