Gaston Modot

In the spring of 1918 German long-range guns were shelling Paris, and Modigliani, already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him within two years, went south to the Riviera with his dealer. There he ran into an old Montmartre friend, Gaston Modot, a painter who had drifted into the new business of cinema. Modigliani gives him the treatment he gave everyone: the neck drawn long, the eyes left blank, the whole man narrowed to a column. Nothing here hints at what Modot would become, a familiar face in French film and, in 1930, the lead in Bunuel's scandalous L'Age d'or. This is one of two portraits Modigliani made of him that year in the south.