Tête de femme

Modigliani painted heads like this one in the last years of his short life, in the cafes and cheap studios of Montparnasse. The long oval face, the tilted neck and the almond eyes left almost blank all come straight out of the stone heads he had carved a few years earlier, before dust and poor health forced him to give up the chisel. He had spent hours in the Louvre among the carved masks of many cultures, and you can feel that flattened, frontal stillness here. Modigliani drank and worked himself past exhaustion and died of tubercular meningitis in Paris in January 1920, only 35 years old. He was barely known beyond his own circle at the time. The high prices came later.