Nudo seduto su un divano

Modigliani painted this nude in 1917, sometimes called La Belle Romaine, the beautiful Roman woman. In December of that year his dealer opened his first and only solo show in a small Paris gallery and hung a nude in the window. The gallery happened to sit across the street from a police station. A crowd gathered, an officer walked over, and the pictures in the window were ordered taken down, some on the grounds that they showed pubic hair, which the painters before Modigliani had always left out. His nudes look nothing like the cool marble goddesses hung in the Salon. The neck is long, the eyes are almond blanks, the body is warm and present and clearly a particular living woman. Modigliani was already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him. He died three years later, at 35, and never had another show in his lifetime.