Portrait of Celso Lagar

By 1915 the war had emptied Montparnasse. Many of the young artists who filled its cafes had gone to the front, and money was scarce. Modigliani, turned down for service and already unwell, stayed behind and painted the friends who remained. One of them was Celso Lagar, a Spanish painter who had come to Paris a few years earlier and fallen in with the same immigrant circle. Modigliani sets him down quickly on a small canvas, the head tilted, the features pulled into the long, carved simplicity he was making his own around this time. The portrait was later given anonymously to the state of Israel, and hangs now in Jerusalem.