Ritratto di Pierre Reverdy

By 1915 the young men of Paris were being sent to the front, and Montparnasse, the artists' quarter, had emptied of many of its foreign painters. Amedeo Modigliani, turned down for service on health grounds, stayed and kept painting the friends who remained. One was Pierre Reverdy, a poet newly arrived from the south whose spare, image-driven verse would later help feed Surrealism. The two were close, meeting at the ramshackle studios of the Cite Falguiere. Reverdy distrusted Cubism, which was fracturing the human face all around them, and thought it no way to paint a person. Modigliani's answer is this calm, almost classical likeness, the head gently lengthened in the manner that was becoming his signature.