Amedeo Modigliani was a European artist in the broadest and most innovative sense. Focusing on the image of the human being, on the physical and on self-confident femininity, Amedeo Modigliani positioned himself as a pioneer of modernism at a time of dissolution of form, abstraction and misogyny at the beginning of the 20th century. During World War I, his portraits and nudes accompanied and shaped the development of the human image of a young generation of artists working on figuration in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, or Dresden. For the first time, an exhibition on Modigliani broadens the view beyond Paris and considers his work from a European perspective. 

The zeitgeist, later called New Objectivity, was also shaped by women writers, fashion designers and painters. With short hairstyles and masculine clothing, some of them were fashionably ahead of their time and lived emancipation. The women of this time, associated as modern bourgeois, had already met Modigliani in the circle of the Parisian avant-garde. Modigliani transferred reflections of these relationships to his paintings, portraying both sexes of the Parisian avant-garde as cosmopolitan artist friends across borders. The stoic nobility of his portraits anticipated the New Objectivity. Modigliani depicted the new image of man without expressive tendencies, yet portrayed the emancipated woman without the cold detachment of New Objectivity or the dissecting view of postwar society. Modigliani even reduced references to the sitter's social background to a minimum. His portraits of women and nudes showed the self-confident matter-of-factness of a femme moderne.

The exhibition Modigliani: Modern Gazes brings together around 100 works. A unique dialogue unfolds between Modigliani's art and the paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures by Gustav Klimt, Jeanne Mammen, Pablo Picasso, Natalja Goncharova, Egon Schiele and Paula Modersohn-Becker, among others. Lenders include the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., the Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, and the Nahmad Collection.

An exhibition of the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, under the patronage of the Ambassay of the Italian Republic in Germany.

The exhibition at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart is on view from November 24, 2023 to March 17, 2024.