ディエゴ・リベラの肖像

In 1916 the Montparnasse quarter of Paris was full of foreign artists waiting out the war. Two of them were Amedeo Modigliani, an Italian Jew far from Livorno, and Diego Rivera, a large, boisterous Mexican then painting in a Cubist manner. The murals that would make Rivera famous were still years off, and waited back home in Mexico. Modigliani usually drew people with a tight, elongated calm. Here he did the reverse, building Rivera out of thick, swirling, orange-brown strokes, as broad and heavy as the man. Rivera remembered him coming again and again to his studio to work on it. It is painted on plain cardboard rather than canvas, the cheap support of a painter with almost no money in a lean wartime year.