莱奥波尔德·兹博罗夫斯基肖像

By 1917 the war had drained Montparnasse of buyers, and Modigliani had no gallery and almost no income. The man in this portrait, Léopold Zborowski, was a Polish poet who had come to Paris to study literature and ended up as Modigliani's dealer and friend, mostly out of loyalty. He paid the rent, found models, and hauled canvases from café to café trying to sell them, often for a few francs. Modigliani painted him more than once. Here the long neck, the tilted head and the narrow, mask-like face are the shorthand he had built from looking at African carving and at the sculptor Brancusi, whom he knew. Zborowski kept trading pictures after Modigliani died in 1920, though friends said his heart was always in poetry.