두 소녀

Modigliani painted these two children in 1918, the last year of the Great War, after his dealer had sent him south to the Riviera. Paris was cold and hungry and dangerous, and Modigliani's lungs were failing from the tuberculosis that would kill him. On the coast around Nice he turned away from the nudes that had scandalised Paris and painted the people around him, servants, shopkeepers' children, local youngsters like these two. One sits in darker clothes, the smaller one in something paler, both given his familiar long necks, tilted oval faces, and eyes left as flat almond shapes with no clear pupil. He had less than two years to live. He died in Paris in January 1920, 35 years old, and the next morning his young partner Jeanne Hebuterne, pregnant with their second child, took her own life.