Young Woman

Most of Amedeo Modigliani’s works were created during a few hectic years during and right after the First World War. The Italian-born artist moved to Paris in 1906 and dithered for a while between sculpture and painting. He worked a year as an assistant to Constantin Brâncusi, whose perception of form can be traced in Modigliani’s masklike portraits. After quickly gaining a reputation as an eminent draughtsman, Modigliani made his living as a café artiste by drawing hastily executed portraits of the café patrons in the hope of securing a commission for versions in oil.

His works are stylistically hard to place: his influences seem to include the primitive African sculptures that were much in vogue at the time, whose linear, elongated forms instil the subjects of his portraits with a touch of sophisticated modernity, while his colours adhere largely to the relaxed, anti-naturalist palette of cubism.

The National Museum’s female portrait has often borne the title Portrait of Mme Zborowska. Mme Zborowska was married to the Polish poet and art dealer Leopold Zborowski, Modigliani’s close friend and agent. But individual traits were not Modigliani’s style, and it seems likely that the sitter is unknown. It was thanks to Leopold Zborowski that Modigliani achieved at least a modicum of fame during his lifetime. But his breakthrough came too late: Modigliani suffered from tuberculosis, and the artist succumbed to illness and alcohol and drug abuse at the age of thirty-five. His posthumous fame continued to grow, however, and during the 1920s his tragic life and idiosyncratic style became a fixture of European modernism.