Portrait of Moise Kiesling

In 1915 Paris was a wartime city, and many of the foreign artists of Montparnasse had gone to the front. Moise Kisling, a Polish painter and one of Modigliani's closest friends, had joined the French Foreign Legion and been discharged after a wound. Back among the cafes, he sat for this small portrait, barely larger than a sheet of paper. You can see Modigliani working through what Cubism had taught him, the face pared down to a few planes, the eyes left almost blank, though he keeps it a real likeness of a friend rather than an experiment. Modigliani himself had only five years left when he painted it; he died in 1920, aged 35.