Late in 1919, in a squalid Paris studio strewn with wine bottles, Amedeo Modigliani painted a wistful portrait of his 21-year-old lover, Jeanne Hébuterne. Afew months later, on January 24, 1920, the ...

Modigliani was convinced Rodin and his followers had corrupted sculpture with an overreliance on clay—“too much mud,” he called it. Real sculptors, he declared, carved directly from stone. To do so ...