Introduction by The Jewish Museum published on 2017-09-07T19:54:04Z CLAUDIA GOULD: Hello, I'm Claudia Gould, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director of The Jewish Museum. I'm so pleased to welcome you to "Modigliani Unmasked." Perhaps you're already familiar with Amedeo Modigliani, and his many portraits of beautiful women with long necks and impenetrable gazes. If so, you may find our show surprising. Thanks to an extraordinary cache of Modigliani’s early drawings on view here, for the first time in the United States, we are able tell a story of exploration and identity. Your guide to the show is Senior Curator, Mason Klein: MASON KLEIN: Modigliani was undeniably a portraitist. But he saw that identity was never quite certain. CLAUDIA GOULD: Modigliani was born in 1884, in Livorno, Tuscany, on the northwest coast of Italy. He left in his early 20s to pursue a career as an artist in Paris. There a strong current of anti-Semitism forced him to reexamine his identity as a Sephardic Jew. MASON KLEIN: When Modigliani came to Paris he had never experienced anti-Semitism. To understand Modigliani, and the way he understood himself allows us to understand what his portraiture was really about, and how he viewed and how he engaged the social realities of Paris in pre-War, and how important that engagement was in laying the groundwork to rethink how positive a presence he was as a Jewish foreign émigré. [PAUSE] I think it really does allow us to think of Modigliani in a kind of original and broader, and more relevant way, certainly relevant to the world we’re living in today. CLAUDIA GOULD: On this tour, you’ll hear more from Mason Klein, as well as from Sander Gilman, a well-known expert on Jewish studies and anti-Semitism, and a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. I hope you enjoy the tour. For further instruction on using your Acoustiguide, please press 4-1-1. NARRATOR: This is Acoustiguide production.