Portrait of Dedie

By 1918 the war had reached into Paris itself. A long-range German gun was dropping shells on the city from about 120 kilometers away, and Modigliani's dealer, Leopold Zborowski, packed several of his painters off to the calmer south coast. Modigliani was already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him within two years, yet this was one of his most productive years: he turned out close to 60 portraits. This is one of them. The sitter is Odette Hayden, known as Dedie, wife of the painter Henri Hayden. He gives her the long neck and the small tilted head he gave almost every model, the eyes left nearly blank in the manner of the African masks he admired. Leaning on the back of a chair, her shoulders rounded, she looks out with a calm shaded by sadness.