Portrait of Mario Varfogli

This was among the last things Modigliani painted. He first sketched the sitter, the Greek composer Marios Varvoglis, over drinks with friends in a Montparnasse cafe on New Year's Eve of 1919, then worked the oil up in the first two weeks of January 1920. By the end of that month he was dead, at 35, of tubercular meningitis, after years of poverty, drink and illness. The long neck and the small, tilted, mask-like face are his habitual way of shaping a person, not anything peculiar to this Greek musician. His companion Jeanne Hebuterne, pregnant with their second child, took her own life two days after he died.