In 1920, at the age of thirty-five, Amedeo Modigliani died in poverty and neglect in Paris, much like a figure out of La Boh`eme. His life had been as dramatic as his death. An Italian Jew from a bourgeois family, "Modi" had a weakness for drink, hashish, and the many women-including the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova-who were drawn to his good looks. His friends included Picasso, Utrillo, Soutine, and other important artists of his day, yet his own work stood apart, generating little interest while he lived. Today's art world, however, acknowledges him as a master whose limited oeuvre-sculptures, portraits, and some of the most appealing nudes in the whole of modern art-cannot satisfy collectors' demand. With a lively but judicious hand, biographer Jeffrey Meyers sketches Modigliani and the art he produced, illuminating not only this little-known figure but also the painters, writers, lovers, and others who inhabited early twentieth-century Paris with him. Astute and prolific Meyers, the Joyce Carol Oates of biographers, has concentrated on literary lives, and now turns to artists. He dubs Amedeo Modigliani "the greatest Italian painter since Tiepolo," but, sadly, Modigliani's talent was matched in force by his self-destructiveness. Efficient yet generous with vivid details and intriguing asides, Meyers describes Modigliani's hometown, Livorno, Italy, and portrays the artist's Jewish family, which, tragically, harbored genes for madness. Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906, handsome as a god, full of sass and ambition, and steeped in Rimbaud and -Nietzsche. Seductive and outrageous, Modigliani knew everyone yet refused to join any of the headline-grabbing movements, developing, instead, an "intensely idiosyncratic vision" that interested nearly no one. A fickle lover, dependent on drink and drugs, and ill with tuberculosis, his dissolution was catastrophic and his poverty appalling, leading inexorably to his death at 35. Meyers explicitly describes the squalor Modigliani fatalistically endured, dispelling romantic notions about starving artists and starkly exposing a cruel paradox--the wretchedness of Modigliani's life versus the transcendent beauty of his art. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Jeffrey Meyers is the author of numerous books on literature, film, and art, including biographies of Katherine Mansfield, Joseph Conrad, and Somerset Maugham. He lives in Berkeley, California..