Portrait of Blaise Cendrars

By 1917 the war had already taken a piece of the man in this portrait. Blaise Cendrars, the Swiss-born poet who wrote in French, had volunteered for the Foreign Legion and lost his right arm at the front in 1915. He was back in Paris, learning to write with his left hand, when his friend Modigliani painted him. Modigliani, kept out of the army by the tuberculosis that would kill him three years later, gives Cendrars the long tilted neck and the narrow, mask-like face he gave nearly everyone he sat down. The colours stay low, browns and greys. He worked on cardboard here, the cheap support of a painter who rarely had money to spare for canvas.