ヴィーキング・エッゲリング

Paris in 1916 was a wartime city, and the foreign artists of Montparnasse who had not been called up kept each other close company. Modigliani painted them constantly. This sitter is Viking Eggeling, a Swede a few years older than him, caught in the long-necked, mask-like manner Modigliani had been distilling out of his own stalled experiments in sculpture. What the portrait cannot show is where Eggeling was heading. Within a few years he would give up painting for film, and in 1924 he finished Symphonie Diagonale, a few minutes of shifting abstract shapes that counts among the earliest abstract films. Here, though, he is simply a friend sitting for another, his features pared back to a quiet oval and a steady gaze.