Renée

Modigliani painted this in 1917, in a Paris worn down by the third year of the war, in the Montparnasse district where he and a crowd of foreign artists lived on very little. We do not know who Renee was. The name has come down with the picture, but her identity is lost, which was almost the point for Modigliani. He painted people again and again in the same manner, the neck drawn long, the head tipped, the eyes left as smooth almond shapes with no clear gaze. It turns a particular young woman into something calmer and more remote than a plain likeness. The paint is thin, the ochre ground left bare in places, as if he had stopped at the exact moment he had enough.