All the famous ones are here, including

 Diego Rivera and Moise Kisling, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, dealers Paul Guillaume and Leopold Zborowski, poet Max Jacob and author Jean Cocteau, who comes across as the perfect snob -- elegantly dressed and aloof with a pinched mouth.The artist considered sculpture China bearing manufacturer his primary interest, although he stopped sculpting shortly after the beginning of World War I because of difficulties the conflict posed, the increased cost of stone and his failing health.
 Since Amedeo Modigliani rates right up there with Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso as one of America's favorite artists, the traveling retrospective exhibition of his work at the Jewish Museum is drawing record crowds.Perhaps none were more equal than his female nude models, who look much the same in their fleshiness except for differences in their diagonal, languorous poses based on geometric forms.But it is the portraits -- more than 50 of them -- that demand the most attention.
This is the first major exhibition of the artist's work in New York since 1951.Organized by the Jewish Museum, where it is on view through Sept.). The show includes 25 sculptures dating from 1909 to 1915, mostly carved from limestone building blocks he scrounged from construction sites in Paris. The impassive expression of these faces is carried over into Modigliani's highly stylized portrait painting with faces that seem indifferent at first glance but still convey the personality of each individual.
All the famous ones are here, including several of pretty, blue-eyed young Jeanne Hebuterne, Modigliani's last mistress who killed herself and her unborn child the day after his death, and the more mature and assertive South African-born journalist Beatrice Hastings, another lover he painted as Madame de Pompadour. Although Modigliani was not a practicing Jew, he was proud of his Jewish cultural heritage and often introduced himself to strangers as "Modigliani, Jew.A study of Modigliani's life as a member of a privileged Italian Jewish community (he claimed descent from Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza) suggests that his portraiture reflected socialist egalitarian ideas he had espoused in Livorno, Italy, before going to Paris.com.