Desnudo recostado

On the 3rd of December 1917, Modigliani had the only solo show of his life, at Berthe Weill's small gallery on the Rue Taitbout in Paris. She hung several of his reclining nudes and put one in the window to draw people in. It worked a little too well. A crowd gathered on the pavement, the police commissioner across the street saw the paintings from his own window, and he sent officers to order the show taken down that same day. What offended 1917 Paris was not the nudity of a goddess or a nymph, but that these were plainly ordinary modern women, warm and awake, painted with body hair, staring straight out at the viewer instead of turning modestly away. Modigliani sold almost nothing. He had less than three years left to live. This is one of that group, warm ochres and reds against a dark ground, the body running right off both edges of the canvas so she barely fits inside it. Nearly a century later, in 2015, the same painting sold in New York for about 170 million dollars to a Chinese collector, Liu Yiqian, who hung it in his Long Museum in Shanghai, where it is now.