Donna seduta con camicetta blu

Modigliani painted this in 1919, the last full year he was alive. He died that January following, 35 years old, worn down by tuberculosis and by hard living in wartime and postwar Paris. By this point he had found the face he would paint over and over. The neck drawn long, the head tipped a little, the eyes often left as blank almond shapes with no pupil at all, a habit that had come out of the years he spent carving stone heads before the war. The woman sits with her hands folded, quite calm, in a plain blue blouse against warm brown. There is no story being told about her and almost no setting. He had learned from African and archaic sculpture to reduce a face to a few sure curves, and a portrait like this is really that lesson, worked in oil.