Portrait of a Woman with a White Collar

1917 was the year Modigliani got his one solo show. It opened at Berthe Weill's small gallery on the rue Taitbout in Paris on 3 December, and the police shut it the same day because the nudes hanging in the window could be seen from the street. Weill was ordered to take the filth down. Almost nothing sold. This portrait belongs to that year, painted while his dealer Léopold Zborowski was keeping him in canvases, models and rent. The museum in Grenoble names the sitter as Lunia Czechowska, a young Polish woman then living in the Zborowski household, whom he painted around ten times. Grenoble bought the picture from the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1923, three years after his death, under the curator Andry-Farcy, who two years before that had brought the first Picasso into a French public collection.