横たわる裸婦

Modigliani painted his reclining nudes between about 1916 and 1919, and they caused real trouble. When several were shown at a small Paris gallery in December 1917, his only solo exhibition while he lived, the police ordered it closed on the opening day, offended that the figures had body hair and looked so frankly out at the viewer. This one, from around 1919, keeps that same directness: the body stretched the full width of the canvas, the face reduced to a smooth, mask-like oval. He was already gravely ill by the time he made it. Within months of finishing work like this he was dead, in January 1920, at 35.