Woman of Algiers

Modigliani painted this in 1917, in wartime Paris, and gave it a title with a long history in French art. Women of Algiers was famously the subject of Delacroix, and later Renoir and others, French painters drawn to imagined scenes of North African life. Modigliani takes that old orientalist theme and strips it right back. There is no harem, no setting, almost no props, just a single seated woman, thought to be a model he called Almaisa, rendered in his signature way: the long neck, the narrow tilted head, the eyes left as blank almond shapes. He had been looking hard at African and archaic sculpture in those years, and you can feel it in the mask-like calm of the face. The warm reddish ground is left plain around her.