Mujer con cinta de terciopelo

Modigliani painted this in 1915, in a Paris emptied by the war. Only a year or so earlier he had given up sculpture, the stone dust was wrecking his lungs and the material had grown scarce, and turned back to paint. You can see the carving in the picture anyway. The woman's face is a smooth mask with a long neck and eyes left blank, without pupils, exactly like the stone heads he could no longer make. What is genuinely rare here is the setting. Instead of his usual bare interior he has put her against an open landscape with two little trees, closer to Gauguin than to anything else he did. The only truly solid black in the whole canvas is her hair and the ribbon at her throat.