Giovane donna

1918 was almost the end for Modigliani. He had less than two years to live, worn down by tuberculosis and hard living in Paris, when this portrait was made. That spring the German army pushed close enough to shell the city, and his dealer Paul Guillaume sent him and a group of artists south to the Riviera to wait out the danger. He spent much of the year around Nice and Cagnes, and painted a run of quiet single figures like this one, a young woman set against a plain ground, her neck lengthened, her eyes left as calm blank ovals in his usual way. Late in 1918 four of his portraits hung in a Paris show of living painters. This canvas, once catalogued under a French title meaning woman with a veil, is now in Dallas.