Female Nude Reclining on a Pillow

Modigliani painted this reclining nude in 1917, at the height of the war and of the one great subject of his last years. That December his dealer, Berthe Weill, put a group of his nudes in her Paris gallery window for his only solo show. A crowd gathered on the street, and the police ordered the pictures taken down the same day for indecency. What scandalised them was exactly this frankness, a warm-toned body stretched right across the canvas, filling it corner to corner, the head resting on a pillow, the gaze level and unbothered. Modigliani had a little over two years left to live when he painted it.