Seated Man Before an Orange Background

By 1918 Modigliani had left Paris. The war was grinding on, his lungs were bad, and his dealer sent him south to the coast around Nice for the sun and cleaner air. He kept painting people the way he always had, faces pared down to long ovals, necks stretched, eyes often left blank, a debt he owed to the African and archaic carvings he had studied in the Paris museums. Here a man simply sits, filling the frame against a flat wall of warm orange that presses close around him. Modigliani had almost no time left. He died in early 1920, at 35.