By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

There’s no question Modigliani is having a moment, especially where auctions are concerned. On Nov. 2 a lush nude sold for a record-smashing $68.9 million at Sotheby’s in New York.

Coming this March: a new artist biography. Seasoned biographer Meryle Secrest has penned Modigliani: A Life.

She previously published books on Salvador Dali, Frank Lloyd Wright, Joseph Duveen, Stephen Sondheim and others. She was a finalist for the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for book about Renaissance art historian Bernard Berenson and a 2006 recipient of the National Humanities Medal.

Modigliani, who died at 35, has been mythologized as a free-wheeling, hard-drinking bohemian artist.  Secrest’s book will present a new interpretation, shattering Modigliani’s hard-core, hashish puffing party-boy image.

The artist hailed from a small Italian town outside of Tuscany. He moved to Paris in 1906 and joined a heady modernist circle including Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera and Juan Gris. Secrest’s book chronicles his artistic training, his impoverished upbringing, and fatal battle with tuberculosis.

The book is available from Knopf in March.