Juan Gris (1887–1927)

By 1915 the war had emptied Montparnasse of many of its painters, sent to the front, but Modigliani had been turned away as unfit and Juan Gris, as a Spaniard, stayed neutral. The two knew each other from the cramped studios of the quarter. Modigliani had spent his early Paris years chasing sculpture, carving stone heads with long necks and narrow eyes borrowed from African masks, until the dust ruined his lungs and the war cut off his supply of stone. When he came back to paint, those carved faces came with him. You can see it here in Gris, the neck drawn out like a column, the features simplified and set slightly off from life, a fellow painter rendered in the language Modigliani had learned from stone.