Adrienne (Woman with Bangs)

On 3 December 1917 Modigliani opened his first and only solo exhibition, at Berthe Weill's small gallery on the rue Taitbout in Paris. Nudes hung in the window, the police ordered them taken down as indecent, and the show was closed on the day it opened. Weill sold two drawings, at 30 francs each.

This portrait is from the same year. Adrienne is a first name the painting carries, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which has owned it since 1963, records nothing about who she was. Its provenance opens with a possibility, that the dealer Paul Guillaume may once have had it, and then a note that Etienne Bignou, another Paris dealer, bought it in 1927 from an artist in Montparnasse who had been a friend of Modigliani. The American collector Chester Dale bought it from Bignou in April 1928 and left it to the Gallery in his will.