Nu em Pé (Elvira)

Modigliani painted this in 1918, the last full year of the First World War. Paris was emptying and food was short, and his dealer had sent him south to the Riviera, partly for his failing lungs. The model, known as Elvira, was a young woman he met there. A year earlier his first solo show in Paris had been shut on its opening day, when the police decided the nudes in the window were indecent and ordered them taken down. This canvas keeps that frankness, the long simplified body and the warm ground, but it was made far from that scandal, in the quiet of the south while the war ground on in the north.