Nude on a Blue Cushion

Modigliani painted his run of reclining nudes in 1917, and this is one of them, a woman stretched across a blue cushion, her warm body filling the whole canvas edge to edge. In December that year his dealer Berthe Weill hung several of these nudes in her small Paris gallery and put one in the window. A crowd gathered, and the police commissioner ordered the show closed within hours, offended that the women were painted with body hair, which the academic nude never showed. It was the only solo exhibition Modigliani had in his lifetime. He was already gravely ill with tuberculosis and had barely two years to live when he laid this figure down against her blue ground.