Daily · Dreamtime

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Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy's children have announced they have taken legal guardianship of their 68-year-old mother, Joan B. Kennedy, to ensure treatment for her alcoholism.

he was downing drugs and alcohol with the best of them, and womanizing with the worst. He got nicknamed Modi (a pun on "cursed,

In "Modigliani: Beyond the Myth," curators are trying to transcend a legend about the man, but it's one that may not have much currency these days: The artist's pictures are still well known, but the scandals of his life have faded away. In the decades following his death in 1920, however, a popular novel, a movie and a play had established Modigliani as the archetype of the hard-living, hard-loving, long-suffering, quick-dying bohemian artist.

Of course that cliched picture doesn't begin to get at who Modigliani really was, or why his art might matter. It also happens to have plenty of truth in it.

Life stayed pretty much the same over the next 10 years. Modigliani's art continued to improve, and began to gain attention, but his habits, finances and health were on an almost nonstop slide downhill. Now and then, various devoted female relatives and lovers helped to dry him out, fatten him up and nurse him back to full artmaking strength, but it never really lasted. By the winter of 1919 he was a drunken wreck wandering the streets of Paris. By Jan. 24, 1920, he was lying dead in a hospital. The next night his 22-year-old girlfriend Jeanne Hebuterne, who'd already had one child by the artist and was pregnant with another, jumped out a window to her death.

That's the dormant myth this show is meant to get beyond. Of course, in the process of insisting that it must be put to rest, curators risk giving it new life.

-- Blake Gopnik