Liegender Akt

In December 1917 Modigliani had his first and only solo exhibition, at Berthe Weill's small Paris gallery. She hung a few of his nudes in the window, and on opening day the police ordered them taken down as indecent. The objection, reportedly, was the body hair, which earlier painters had always smoothed away. Modigliani had come to these reclining figures only a year or two before, after giving up sculpture when the stone dust and his weak lungs made carving impossible. He was living on very little, already ill with tuberculosis. He would be dead by January 1920, at 35, and it was only after that, not before, that nudes like this one began to sell.