Girl with brown hair

A Modigliani in the Musee Picasso in Paris reads like a filing error, until you know what that museum keeps. Beside Picasso's own work it holds the collection he built of other artists, pictures he bought, was given, or traded his own canvases for, and that collection passed into the French national holdings in the 1970s, after his death. This painting of 1918 is the Modigliani in it. The two men had known each other in Paris since about 1906, moved through the same circles of studios and cafes, and in 1915 Modigliani painted Picasso's portrait. The museum's title here is La Chevelure noire, the black hair, also recorded as Jeune fille brune, assise, a seated dark-haired young woman. It gives her no name, and nothing in the record says who sat for it.