Portrait de Lunia Czechowska (1919)

Lunia Czechowska was a young Polish woman in the circle of Léopold Zborowski, the dealer who housed and fed Modigliani and took his paintings in return. Modigliani painted her again and again between 1917 and 1919, always dressed, always composed, never as one of his famous nudes. He made this portrait in 1919, worn down by the tuberculosis that would kill him in January 1920 at 35. His late manner is fully settled here, calm and spare: the long oval face, the drawn-out neck, the eyes left as flat almond shapes with almost no detail. Czechowska outlived him by more than half a century and spent much of it recalling the sittings in his cold Montparnasse studio.