Retrato de Baranowski

By 1918 Modigliani had about two years left to live and very little money. He painted his friend Baranowski, a Polish painter drifting through the same Paris cafés, on a sheet of hardboard rather than canvas, and underneath the portrait sits an abandoned figure from his Caryatid series, reused because material was scarce. That rough support later caused trouble. In the 1990s experts decided the picture could not be genuine and struck it from the list of his works. Then close technical study reversed them: fingerprints pressed into the wet paint and the buried caryatid matched his hand, and Baranowski was given back to Modigliani. The long neck and the blank, almond eyes are the face he gave nearly everyone he painted that year.