Nu allongé aux mains entrelacées

On 3 December 1917, Modigliani's first and only solo exhibition opened at Berthe Weill's small gallery on the Rue Taitbout in Paris. A crowd gathered around the nudes hung in the window. Within hours the police commissioner ordered the show closed for offending public decency, and when Weill argued, they took her to the station. The offence was simple. Modigliani painted his women as women, warm and awake, without the fig leaf or the goddess's name that had made nudity respectable for centuries. This reclining figure, her hands folded together, belongs to that same run of pictures. The pose looks back to Renaissance Venuses, but there is no myth here to excuse her, only a person lying on a bed.