Muchacha pelirroja

Modigliani painted this in Paris in 1915, while the First World War had emptied the city of the young men he knew. His own poor health kept him out of the army, and around this time he gave up the stone carving he loved, partly because the dust was hurting his lungs, and went back to painting faces. This is one of them, a girl he never named, built from warm browns and hot cinnabar reds. Those scorched reds may owe something to his close friend Chaim Soutine, another immigrant painter drawn to the same colour. She is less a portrait of a person than a study of a head, one of a run of small anonymous faces he made in these years, where a tilt of the neck and a few simplified features carry the whole picture.