女性裸体

Modigliani painted this nude in Paris around 1916, in the middle of the war, when he had turned from portraits to the run of female nudes that would become his most famous and most scandalous work. He had spent hours in the city's ethnographic museum among African and Egyptian carving, and you can see it in the woman's long oval head and calm mask of a face, the body simplified into a few sure curves. A year later, in 1917, the police shut down a show of these nudes at the Berthe Weill gallery on the opening day, objecting to the frank painting of hair and skin. This one keeps the raw, worked surface and the flushed face that unsettled viewers who expected a smooth, idealised nude.