Max Jacob

By 1916 much of Paris had emptied toward the front of the First World War, but a thinned circle of poets and painters still kept its evenings in the cafés of Montparnasse. One of them was the poet Max Jacob, who years before had shared a cramped, freezing studio with the young Picasso and helped steer him through the city. Modigliani liked to paint the friends he drank and argued with, and he gave Jacob the elongated head and long neck he brought to almost everyone who sat for him. Jacob had lately turned to Catholicism after describing a vision of Christ on the wall of his room, a private upheaval running underneath these years of café talk. Modigliani would be dead by 1920, at 35, only a few years after setting down this watchful likeness of his friend.