爱丽丝

Modigliani painted this around 1918, and by then he was very sick. He had left Paris for the south of France to escape both the last year of the war and the tuberculosis that would kill him two years later, at 35. Down on the coast he painted the people around him, and this is one of them, a young girl named Alice in a blue Sunday dress with a small gold cross at her throat. Look at how he built her face. The long neck, the tilted oval, the almond eyes left as flat dark shapes with almost no white, none of it drawn from life so much as from the African and archaic masks he had been carving and sketching for years. She meets your eye anyway. The cross and the good dress are the only things here that place her in an actual room on an actual Sunday.