Jeanne Hébuterne mit rotem Schal

In his last years in Paris, Modigliani painted one face more than any other, that of Jeanne Hébuterne, the quiet young art student who had left her strict Catholic family to live with him. She sits wrapped in a red shawl, drawn the way he drew her again and again: the long tilted neck, the small mouth, the almond eyes left blank and pupil-less, as if turned inward. He built the look partly from the African and Cycladic carvings he loved in the Paris collections. The couple lived hand to mouth through the war years, and Modigliani was already sick with the tuberculosis that killed him early in 1920. Jeanne, expecting their second child, took her own life the day after he died.