Portrait de Jeanne Hébuterne de profil

Modigliani painted this profile of Jeanne Hebuterne in 1918, the year the couple spent on the French Riviera, away from a Paris still under wartime strain, while she was pregnant with their daughter. She was 20, an art student herself, and he painted her more than 20 times. Here he keeps her in strict profile, the coiled hair rising almost like a crown, the neck drawn long, the eyes left a blank blue. That spareness came from what he loved, the African carved masks and the smooth simplified heads of his friend the sculptor Brancusi. The calm of the picture sits oddly against their turbulent life together. Two years later Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis. Jeanne, pregnant again, took her own life two days after, at 21.