Porträt der Margherita

Modigliani painted this in 1916, in a Paris half emptied by the war. He had trained as a sculptor and would have gone on carving stone heads, but the dust was ruining his weak lungs and good stone was scarce in wartime, so he gave it up and turned almost entirely to portraits. You can still feel the carver in them. The face is built like a mask, the neck lengthened, the features pared down to a few clean lines. He worked quickly, usually from a single sitting, painting whoever happened to be around him in Montparnasse, friends, dealers, models, neighbours. The woman here, Margherita, sits in that stripped-down way he had made his own. He kept the background almost bare, so that nothing at all competes with the tilt of her head.