A Italiana

Modigliani painted this around 1918, during a stretch when he had left wartime Paris for the south of France. His health was failing and the move to the Riviera was meant to help. Nobody knows who the woman was; one guess is that he chose her because, like him, she was Italian and far from home. She has the long neck, tilted head and mask-like calm he gave nearly all his sitters, whoever they were. He worked quickly and rarely fussed over a likeness in the usual sense. Within two years he would be dead at 35, and this quiet portrait comes from that last, fragile stretch of his life.