Sitting Almaiisa

By 1916 the young men of Montparnasse had mostly gone to the front, and Paris was a city of women, foreigners and the unfit, Modigliani among them, ill with tuberculosis. That year he painted this seated woman, and unusually he recorded her name, Almaisa, when most of his sitters stayed anonymous. She sits very still, hands folded, her face pared down to an almond mask with the long neck he gave nearly everyone. Modigliani had spent time with the sculptor Brancusi and studied the African and Khmer carving then reaching Paris dealers' windows, and you can see it in how little he needed, a few planes and two dark eyes. The background is bare, the palette warm and close.