Nu couché (sur le côté gauche)

This is the largest painting Modigliani ever made, and the only one of his long reclining nudes to fit the whole body onto the canvas. He painted it in 1917, the year his dealer Berthe Weill hung a group of these nudes in her small Paris gallery for what would be his only solo show. It opened, drew a crowd on the pavement, and the police ordered it shut the same day for indecency. The complaint, by most accounts, was the frank body hair, still unusual in painted nudes at the time. Weill sold almost nothing. Modigliani died three years later at 35, poor and largely unsold. In 2018 this canvas brought about 157 million dollars at auction in New York.