Les Mariés

Paris, 1915. The war had emptied Montparnasse. Most of Modigliani's friends were away at the front, and the stone he had been carving into heads before 1914 had grown scarce and dear. Turned down for service himself because of his frail lungs, he set the chisel aside and went back to paint. This is one of very few canvases where he put two people together rather than a single sitter. A husband and wife stand pressed side by side, their faces narrowed to long ovals with the eyes left almost blank, the look he had drawn from African masks and from his own carving. The man's collar and tie are set down in a few sure strokes. He gave the couple no room around them, no furniture, nothing but each other against a bare ground.