Girl with Red Hair

The girl sits in silence.
A long neck.
A smooth face.
And eyes whose emotions are difficult to read.

This painting is a portrait Modigliani made around 1915.
It was precisely the period when he had given up sculpture and was immersing himself deeply in painting.

A Painting That Looks Like a Sculpture

Modigliani's figures are always spare.

Faces stretch long,
necks flow smoothly into them,
and surfaces are as polished as freshly carved stone.

The years he spent as a sculptor left their mark.

This girl's face in particular carries something mask-like about it —
a quality that can be traced to the African sculpture that exerted such a powerful influence on Modigliani at the time.

Deliberately Imperfect

Look closely, and the face is subtly asymmetrical.

The two eyes differ slightly in size and placement,
and the face appears frontal yet is turned ever so slightly to one side.
Only one ear is visible.

Modigliani deliberately avoided perfect symmetry.

Instead, small dissonances generate a quiet tension across the picture plane.

That is why his portraits, though still, have a way of holding the gaze far longer than expected.

The Parisian Currents Behind the Background

The background, too, repays attention.

Simple planes of color are divided in a geometric manner —
a reflection of the Cubist influence then sweeping through Paris.

Modigliani was himself studying Cubism during this period.

Yet he never became a Cubist painter in any complete sense.

Rather, he absorbed all of those influences in his own way,
ultimately leaving behind faces that resemble no one else's.

Perhaps Modigliani's paintings were never really portraits of human faces at all —
but renderings of the particular shape that loneliness takes inside a person.