Woman With Red Hair

Painted in Paris in 1917, this canvas belongs to the most concentrated period of Modigliani's portrait production. By this point he had largely abandoned sculpture, which had damaged his already fragile lungs, and had committed fully to painting under the encouragement of the dealer Paul Guillaume and, later, Léopold Zborowski. The sitters of these years, often anonymous models from his Montparnasse circle, became vehicles for a coherent formal language: the stretched neck, the tilted head, the masklike face that critics have connected both to African and Oceanic art he had studied at the Trocadéro and to the elongated saints of Italian Mannerism, particularly the work of Modigliani's compatriot Pontormo. The red-haired model recurs in at least one other canvas from roughly the same period, suggesting she was a regular presence in the studio. Modigliani's portraits were met with scandal at his only solo exhibition in December 1917, when the Paris police shut down the Berthe Weill gallery for displaying nudes in the window; the clothed portraits shown alongside them, works very much like this one, were consequently overshadowed in the contemporary record, though they have since come to be regarded as the core of his achievement. He died in January 1920 at thirty-five, and the paintings that had sold for almost nothing in his lifetime entered major collections within a generation.