Bakst, who had prophesied Chagall's great future to me, said to me one fine day: 'Stay here in my studio. I am expecting someone, someone special. He is an Italian sculptor and painter from Livorno, Modigliani. He is doing a portrait of me. Look at his sketch, how carefully executed it is. All my features are so sharply reproduced, without any retouching, as if with a stiletto. He must be poor, but he looks like a prince. He really must be someone special .....'
A tall, erect young man entered the studio. His gait, like that of a Spanish dancer, made him look like an Indian from the Andes. A clinging sweater covered his torso. From his pale face, framed by a mass of hair, a piercing look emanated from beneath his broadly arching sharp eyebrows. Later I discovered that this concentrated gaze, which was directed above our heads, was the unfortunate result of his drug-taking.

Modigliani quickly brushed aside the polite introductions as if he was burning with impatience to start work. He did not touch the tea or cake which Bakst brought him. Slowly but surely he began painting; the muscles of his chin and his hands were very tense. He answered our questions courteously but tersely; his entire attention was concentrated on the picture. He allowed himself to be distracted from his work only when Bakst began speaking about Maurice Utrillo. And when someone who had just come into the room asked him why Utrillo always depicted sad subjects, Modighani answered, not so much with bitterness as with fury: 'One paints only what one sees. Take the painters out of their hovels! Yes, art lovers and dealers are shocked that instead of landscapes we paint only ugly suburbs with trees all black and twisted and covered in soot and smoke, and interiors in which the living room is right next to the toilet! Since we are forced to live like rag-and-bone men in such lowly dwellings, these are the impressions which we reproduce. Every age gets the painters it deserves, and the subjects drawn from the life which it gives them. During the Renaissance the painters lived in palaces, in velvet, in the sun! And today, just look at the filth in which a painter such as Utrillo must live, at the hospitals he has been forced to attend, then you will no longer ask why he paints only dirt-encrusted walls, disease-ridden streets, barred window after barred window!'

Modigliani loved Utrillo very much. Their first meeting was quite peculiar. First, in order to demonstrate their admiration for each other, they exchanged jackets. Then the one said to the other:

'You are the greatest painter in the world!'
'No, you are the greatest painter in the world!'
'I forbid you to contradict me!'
'I forbid you to defend me!'
'If you say that once more I will box your ears.
'You are the biggest....'
They started fighting. Then they made up in a wine shop. They drank numerous bottles and exchanged jackets several more times. Then they left.
'So you agree, you are the greatest painter in the world?'
'No, you are!'
Slap! Smack!
They started fighting again. They rolled into a ditch, fell asleep there and woke up shivering the next morning to find that they had been robbed by thieves.

From: Giovanni Scheiwiller, Amedeo Modighani-Selbstzeugnisse, Pbotos, Zeicbnungen, pp. 61-4