The Queen of Bohemia

Portraits of Welsh writer and artist Nina Hamnett, known for larger than life personality and her many love affairs with both men and women in the artist community. She drank heavily and once danced nude on a Montparnasse café table just for the "hell of it".

In 1932 Hamnett published Laughing Torso, a tale of her bohemian life, and 23 years later released a follow-up book titled Is She a Lady?.

During the last years of her life she spent a good deal of time drinking. She died at age 66 after a fall from a window. It is not known whether it was accidental or a suicide.

These are Portraits of Nina Hamnett:

1) Roger Fry, 1917
2) Roger Fry, 1917
3) Adrian Flowers, 1955
4) Amadeo Modigliani, 1914

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"Lunia Czechowska," Amadeo Modigliani, 1919.

I'm neither here nor there with Modigliani. I get that many love him, and there are some appealing aspects to his work, but I can never quite wrap my head around his distortion of the human body. Lunia was the daughter of a Polish patriot, and was a refugee in Paris when she met Modigliani. He painted multiple pictures of her, and they were close (and may or may not have been lovers, impossible to tell), so it's not as if he's being vicious here, like Picasso could be when he distorted the bodies of his sitters in seeming acts of artistic violence.

But the elongation of the head and neck are just...weird to me. I know, I know, it's Expressionism, and I can get that, except it's not a consistent thing; her hands, and her body, are more or less normal. Her neck is elongated enough, but the open neck of her dress and the skin shown make it look even longer, an effective illusion.

Maybe the dude just got off on necks?

From a private collection.

#Art #Expressionism #AmadeoModigliani #Portrait #WomenInArt