Retrato de Elena Pavlowski

Modigliani painted this portrait in Paris in 1917, in the third year of the First World War, when the city he had come to from Italy was drained of men and money. That same year he had his first and only solo show, and the police ordered the nudes in the window taken down on the opening day. The portraits are what he is loved for now: the long neck and oval face, the small pursed mouth, the eyes often left as blank almond shapes with no pupils, as here. He drew that stillness from the African and archaic sculpture he studied in the Paris museums. He was already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him three years later, at 35. The sitter, Elena Pavlowski, is otherwise little recorded.