Nu couché de dos

Modigliani painted this in 1917, the year his nudes got him into real trouble. That December the dealer Berthe Weill hung 32 of his works in her small Paris gallery, his first and only solo show, and set a nude in the window to pull in passers-by. It worked too well. Within hours the police ordered the show closed for offending public decency. What they objected to was really just honesty: he painted the body of an actual woman, warm skin against a dark ground, instead of giving her a goddess's name to make the nakedness respectable. The pose itself is old, borrowed from the reclining nudes of Titian and Boucher. Here he turns the figure fully away from us, the long curve of her back running almost the width of the canvas.