On the 140th anniversary of the birth of the great artist from Livorno Amedeo Modigliani the photo/biographical project is back by popular demand ‘Modigliani’s places between Livorno and Paris’ which its author, the director and photographer Luca Dal Canto, has been exhibiting since 2014 between Italy and France. From 23 May to 13 June 2024 a selection of photos of the two cities so dear, for better or for worse, to the painter and sculptor born in 1884 in via della Barriera Maremmana in Livorno (from 1888 via Roma) will be exhibited in Paris at the Librairie Jousseaume , inside the nineteenth-century Galerie Vivienne on rue des Petits Champs, a stone’s throw from the Musée du Louvre and the Palais Royal, now the seat of the Council of State. The vernissage, in the presence of the author, is scheduled for Thursday 23 May from 4pm to 8pm. From April on the shelves of the prestigious bookshop there will also be some copies of the book-catalogue of the project which collects all 55 photographs of the places and the stories about the life of the artist from Livorno.
Luca Dal Canto, award-winning filmmaker and assistant director of important Italian film directors, in the last year has collaborated with Alexis Sweet and Laszlo Barbo as assistant director planner in the TV series ‘Viola come il mare 2’ with Can Yaman and Francesca Chillemi, broadcast from May 3rd in prime time on Canale 5, and with director Chiara Malta and Valerio Mastrandrea in the dramedy series ‘Antonia’, currently on Prime Video. As a photographer Dal Canto returns to exhibit in France after the exhibitions in Strasbourg (2016), Marseille (2021) and Paris (2022) and does so in a truly magical place. The Jousseaume bookshop is in fact the oldest Parisian bookshop still in business today. Opened in 1826, inside, surrounded by over 5000 ancient and rare volumes, you can still feel the nineteenth-century atmosphere that saw writers and intellectuals frequenting this passage couvert, declared a Monument Historique since 1974. In the bookshop managed today by François Jousseaume you could in fact meet very easily, over the centuries, Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, the elusive Éugene Vidocq, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Louis Aragon and many others, all attracted by the charm of the place and its famous cabinet de lecture which allowed sit down and comfortably use the many volumes on display. An incredibly fascinating environment and probably also frequented by Amedeo, a lover of literature and friend of some of these great characters.
A photographic journey on the life and character of an immortal character in the oldest bookshop in the French capital
‘Modigliani’s places between Livorno and Paris’ (‘Les lieux de Modigliani entre Livourne et Paris’) is made up of 49 places where Amedeo lived and worked, immortalized by Dal Canto’s shots as they are today, after 100 years of changes social and urban planning issues that have affected the two cities. The history and work of Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), a mythical figure sometimes beyond belief, is made up of bistros, streets, buildings, cafés, squares, narrow ateliers, environments once full of life and culture. The exhibition, halfway between documentary and reportage, illustrates how globalization has sometimes swept away culture to make room for banks, insurance institutions and restaurants; other times, however, due to degradation, abandonment or tourist policies which have only had the ‘demerit’ of flattening the atmosphere of a once unique place. Each photograph is also linked to a story taken from the artist’s life, visible through a QR code. Episodes that outline his tragic, brilliant existence and that tell him above all from a human point of view, trying to shed light on the many legends that have been handed down over the years.
This photographic journey therefore outlines the character of a great artist and of a man who had dreams, hopes, but also many fears and insecurities. A man who suffered and for whom fate reserved a tragic and premature end. An immortal character whose photographic author wants to make us forget the derogatory nickname ‘Modì’ (derived from the French ‘maudit’ or ‘cursed’), in favor of the more correct, tender and familiar ‘Dedo’, as his mother Eugenia called him daily and he himself used it for letters and postcards. ‘The contemporary but affectionate eye of Luca Dal Canto returns with documentary rigor not only the diary (in the sense of chronological scansion) of an artistic journey, but also the change (and a romantic eye could also understand the degeneration) of the urban panorama of a century.
A very coherent story, even technically, both in the impeccable clarity of a black and white from times gone by, which seems to allude to the happy pioneering of Felix Nadar, and in the opaque sobriety of an almost pictorial color, without ever post-shot emphasis fashion’. This is how the Italian art historian Giorgio Cricco comments on the project. Among the wooden shelves and ancient literary masterpieces of the Parisian Librairie Jousseaume, for three weeks we will talk about a great Italian artist and his colorful city: Livorno, Livourne for the French. From 23 May to 13 June 2024, free admission.
