Head of a young woman

By 1915 most of the men Modigliani had been drinking with in Montparnasse were in uniform. He was turned down for service, his lungs already bad, and the stone carving he had worked at before the war had stopped, since the dust was the worst thing possible for him. What he had instead was paint and a dealer. Paul Guillaume had begun buying him in 1914 and owned this head, and the woman in it is very probably Beatrice Hastings, an English writer and journalist who lived with him through those first war years. The long face and the narrow, columnar neck are the carved heads carried over into oil. The canvas stayed in Paris until the Venice Biennale showed Modigliani again in 1930, ten years after his death, and a Milan gallery bought it for Italy.