(From DCist intern Judy Coleman)
The Modigliani exhibit enters its final week at the Phillips Collection, and all D.C. seems to know it. The small third floor of the building was packed this past weekend when DCist was there. It’s no surprise the exhibit is such a hit –- the distinctive works of the early Modernist master are immediately accessible. His biography is presented as an equation of identity struggles, passionate affairs, and the artistic influences blossoming in early 20th century Paris.

The exhibit can be traversed in an hour’s time, as the works are crowded into each room, making them easy to compare though reducing the ability to reflect deeply on any one piece alone. The exhibition does well to start off with five of Modigliani’s early stone sculptures of female heads. Through these pieces, the tribal, almost pagan, aspects of Modigliani’s celebrated portraiture come into focus. Modigliani’s figures are flat, but their faces, on the painted canvas viewed up close, have the heft and dimension of stone idols.

The audio tour neatly packages the details of the artist’s life and influences — complete with canned accordion and mandolin music and soundbites from the exhibition’s curator and art scholars from around the world. The exhibit does itself no justice by stating at the outset that Modigliani perfectly fit the mold of the tortured artist. His tumultuous affairs, his furious obsession with the faces that haunted him, his death at age 36 — all suggest an easy read of the artist’s biographic arc. The exhibition never strays too far from his stated thesis.