Elvira Resting at a Table
1919
Amedeo Modigliani
Italian, 1884–1920
oil on canvas
Place made: Paris, France
Framed within a modest interior, Elvira faces the viewer, leaning on a sharply sloping table seen from above. This skewed arrangement compresses the subject within her environment. The sitter for this painting was a young working class woman from Montparnasse, the neighborhood of Modigliani's Parisian studio.
The artist’s signature device of leaving the sitter’s eyes blank denies the viewer access to the woman’s inner self, causing us to focus more on formal concerns: continual line in her smooth, apparently two-dimensional face, and the textural contrast between her austere black dress and the brushstrokes in the pale blue background. Modigliani was a prominent figure of the “School of Paris,” a loose group of figurative painters who worked in France after the First World War. His greatest contribution to modern art was in portraiture.
Elvira Resting at a Table
1919
Amedeo Modigliani
Italian, 1884–1920
oil on canvas
Place made: Paris, France
Framed within a modest interior, Elvira faces the viewer, leaning on a sharply sloping table seen from above. This skewed arrangement compresses the subject within her environment. The sitter for this painting was a young working class woman from Montparnasse, the neighborhood of Modigliani's Parisian studio.
The artist’s signature device of leaving the sitter’s eyes blank denies the viewer access to the woman’s inner self, causing us to focus more on formal concerns: continual line in her smooth, apparently two-dimensional face, and the textural contrast between her austere black dress and the brushstrokes in the pale blue background. Modigliani was a prominent figure of the “School of Paris,” a loose group of figurative painters who worked in France after the First World War. His greatest contribution to modern art was in portraiture.