Snap Judgments

Jonathon Keats

The author of 20 biographies, on creators from Robert Frost to D.H. Lawrence to Humphrey Bogart, Berkeley writer Jeffrey Meyers clearly knows how to organize a basic chronology. Yet he doesn't appear to have lived for any length of time with the subject of his latest book. At 23, struggling to survive in Paris in 1907, the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani was already at the center of artistic life in Montmartre, close to Picasso and his circle, but in the 12 remaining years of his reckless life, he could scarcely sell a portrait. As Meyers notes, the painter's premature death from tuberculosis brought about a reversal of fortune abrupt even by art world standards. A decade later, nudes sold by the artist for a meager 150 francs brought more than 3,000 times that amount; more recently, a portrait of his mistress sold at auction for $31.3 million. Perhaps no biography could be expected to encompass the passion of Modigliani's life, the beauty of his art, the scope of his legend, but Meyers does little more than register the basic facts. Nevertheless, his thin research, flat writing, and colorless interpretation may make readers all the more eager to set down his book and seek out Modigliani's vivid artwork. C