O Pintor Krémègne

By 1916 Paris was a wartime city, and the young foreign painters around Montparnasse were living on very little. Modigliani was one of them, and so was the man in this portrait, Pinchus Krémègne, a Lithuanian who had crossed into France a few years earlier and had just given up sculpture for painting. The two knew each other from that circle of immigrants, and Modigliani painted him much as he painted his close friend Chaim Soutine around the same time, seated square to us with his hands resting on his knees, the paint worked up thick and dense. There is no setting, no props, nothing to say what year it is or what was going on outside. Krémègne would outlive almost everyone in that group. He kept painting until 1981, dying at 90 in the south of France.