Ragazza con camicetta a pois

This was painted in 1919, in a Paris just catching its breath after the war, and it belongs to the last full year of Modigliani's life. He would be dead of tubercular meningitis by January 1920, not yet 36. The sitter was likely a fashionable young woman from his circle, her hair cropped in the new short style. Notice how her face narrows to that long oval with the small pursed mouth. Modigliani had spent years around African and other carved masks in Paris, many of them handled by his dealer Paul Guillaume, who also sold African sculpture, and you can feel those simplified planes pressed into a living face. The thin, quick paint and the clean dark outline are how he worked near the end, fast and sure.