Jeanne Modigliani (1918–1984)

Jeanne Modigliani, née Giovanna Hébuterne, was born in Nice, France, the daughter of Amedeo Modigliani and his companion Jeanne Hébuterne, both painters. When she was 14 months old in 1920, her father died, and two days later her mother took her own life by jumping out of a window in despair. Jeanne was brought up in her father's native city of Livorno, Italy, by her paternal grandmother Eugénie Garsin-Modigliani and her aunt Margherita Modigliani, who adopted her. Jeanne graduated from the University of Florence with a degree in art history. She married Mario Cesare Silvio Levi, an Italian economist and brother of poet Natalia Ginzburg. In the 1930s, she was persecuted as a Jew in Fascist Italy, and moved to Paris. After France was invaded by Nazi Germany in World War II, she joined the French Resistance, and was imprisoned for a time. In the Libération-Sud network of the Resistance, she met Valdemar Nechtschein (alias Victor Leduc), a German Jewish philosophy teacher, and René Glodek, with whom she worked to produce the underground journal Action. She later married Nechtschein, and they had two daughters; the couple divorced in 1980. As an artist, she painted abstract compositions. She became an art historian and wrote, among other things, a biography of Vincent van Gogh in 1952. She researched and wrote her father's biography, Modigliani senza leggenda (Modigliani, Man and Myth), published in 1958, which she translated into French herself in 1961. She wrote a revised edition in 1984 for the centenary of her father's birth.
In 1981, she set up the most complete Modigliani exhibition to date, with more than 250 works, including paintings, sculptures, gouaches, and drawings.