Telegraph on Modigliani and Akhmatova's Unrequited Love

A new exhibition of Amedeo Modigliani's drawings opens at the Estorick Collection in London this week. Modigliani and Russian poet Anna Akhmatova met circa 1910 and "became inseparable" immediately after their introduction. At Telegraph, Lucy Davies explores their romance.

At six feet tall, raven-haired and ravishingly beautiful, 21-year-old Anna Akhmatova proved something of a sensation when she arrived in Paris on the arm of her husband in 1910 – people would turn to look at her in the street. The couple were on their honeymoon, and, being poets of some repute in their native Russia, headed straight for Montparnasse, then the favoured haunt of the Parisian avant garde. Here they mingled with the penniless painters, sculptors, poets and composers who had moved to the area from the increasingly chichi Montmartre, in search of cheap rent, cheap cafés and run-down buildings that might serve as studios.

One such artist was the 25-year-old Amedeo Modigliani, who had arrived from Italy four years before. With an aristocratic Roman nose, a strong jaw and a mop of jet-black hair, he enchanted Anna, and the two became inseparable. “This was a meeting of hearts and minds,” says Richard Nathanson, who has helped put together an exhibition of Modigliani’s drawings at London’s Estorick Collection, which opens this week. Modigliani drew her 16 times, according to Nathanson, but many works have been lost in the intervening years; three of the 28 drawings in the show are of Akhmatova. “Once you look at the connection [between them], you see it everywhere in his paintings.”

Continue at Telegraph.