“To do any work, I must have a living person, I must be able to see him opposite me.”
—Amedeo ModiglianiWith its near-sculptural use of paint, in brushstrokes built up in varying tones to give dimension to the face and head of the sitter, Tête de jeune fille (Louise) is a portrait of remarkable immediacy and intensity. Painted in 1915 during a pivotal moment in Amedeo Modigliani’s career, where the artist returned with force to painting after a period dedicated to his sculptural practice, Tête de jeune fille (Louise) draws on a range of stylistic influences, synthesized through the artist’s distinctive pictorial idiom and refined into what he would term “Le grand style.”

 

Rendered in warm, terracotta tones with flushes of pink, and darker notes vibrantly accented by bold brushstrokes in blue and green, Tête de jeune fille (Louise) demonstrates the sophistication of Modigliani’s handling of paint. In keeping with Modigliani’s stylistic development during these crucial months, we can see all of the characteristics of his early style—the “importance of black in structuring the picture; mid-length, frontal figures against an indeterminate, deliberately rough background; the absence of details and the beginnings of distortion”—pushed in sophisticated new directions.ⁱ With her elongated neck, elegantly sloping shoulders, and distinctive almond eyes, Tête de jeune fille (Louise) demonstrates the significant developments made in this important year towards realizing the artist’s signature style, notably in the more stylized treatment of her features and darker construction of the eyes that would be such a prominent feature of his portraits in the following years. 

 

Although little is known about the sitter, Modigliani returned to her several times between 1914 and 1917, first in a sensitively rendered watercolor, in which she appears with the same dark headscarf that accentuates the smooth curve of her forehead and rounded face. The present work is most closely related to a slightly larger portrait, Little Louise, 1915, showing the model in the same pose, but presented in a three-quarter seated view. In focusing more directly on the face and head of the titular Louise with disarming directness in Tête de jeune fille (Louise), Modigliani generates a profound psychological charge, adding a note of sensuality in the delicate rendering of her gently parted lips and blushed cheeks. 

 

Just as in his earliest years in Paris, when the artist was based in Montmartre and painted his friends and neighbors gravitating around the rue du Delta, he resumed this practice when he returned to painting in 1915. Modigliani created portraits of the cosmopolitan collection of writers, dealers, and artists gathered around the bars and studios of Montparnasse including the likes of Chaïm Soutine, Juan Gris, and Moïse Kisling. As in Tête de jeune fille (Louise), the more closely cropped format of these bust portraits, and the sense of tender familiarity between artist and model that they document, work together to “underscore the intimacy and immediacy with which the artist approached his subject.”ⁱⁱ

 

A Sculptor’s Vision

 

Modigliani’s move to Montparnasse had been prompted by the close working relationship that he had developed with the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and it is easy to imagine the enthusiasm with which a young man who had spent his childhood in provincial Italy would approach this vibrant new city and blend of intellectual and artistic ideas. In the artist’s own words, in these years he was at the epicenter of “this great intellectual crossroads, where the sons of all races mingle, united in a common artistic ideal, where the art of tomorrow is developed, where the fusion of all the peoples of Europe and the world is perhaps being prepared”—vividly captured in his portraits from this height of his career.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Although known primarily as a painter, Modigliani’s sculptural practice, developed in the early 1910s, would profoundly shape his painterly language, with the “attenuated forms and stylized features of the stone pieces, and the flat, linear style of the drawings […] resurfacing in his later paintings.”^iv Friend and fellow painter Nina Hamnett would emphasize the primary importance of sculpture in Modigliani’s practice, and although he also worked in wood, his carved limestone heads first presented at the 1912 Salon d’Automne are a stunning articulation of the artist’s fundamental preoccupation with questions of line and form. Recalling the technical finesse and expressive power of his mentor Brancusi’s rounded and radically simplified forms, Modigliani rejected a tradition exemplified in the modern age by the expressive turbulence of Auguste Rodin’s sculpted surfaces. Modigliani turned increasingly to non-Western modes of representation in the exquisite refinement and purification of his forms.

 

As with other avant-garde artists of the period, Modigliani’s access to the so-called “primitive’” wooden masks imported, exhibited, and circulated by his friend and dealer Paul Guillaume would prove vital in these years. The immediacy and expressiveness of these carved facial forms was uniquely synthesized in Modigliani’s work with the elongated distortions characteristic of the 16^th century Italian Mannerist painting that would have been so familiar to him. Modigliani first met Guillaume at the close of 1914, the same period that Carl Einstein’s hugely influential primitivist study Negerplastik was published, celebrating the “state of motionless ecstasy” achieved in these objects through an “elaboration of a purified structure.”^v

 

Representing one of the most important professional relationships in Modigliani’s short life, Guillaume was hugely active in promoting the artist’s work both in Paris and internationally, sending examples of his sculpture to New York in 1916 to an important group exhibition at the Modern Gallery. It was Guillaume who was instrumental in Modigliani’s return to painting in these years, and his proximity to both the intellectual Guillaume and his impressive collection of African art would motivate the formal and stylistic innovations pioneered by the artist from this point on. In the well-known series of drawn and painted portraits of Guillaume created by Modigliani between 1914 and 1916, Modigliani celebrated his sitter’s unique role in shaping and guiding this next chapter of avant-garde experiment. In the masterful Paul Guillaume, Nova Pilota, 1915, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, the extent to which the artist had successfully transposed the plastic effects of the mask from sculpture into painting is evident; the dealer’s likeness is rendered through a carefully observed stylization and schematization focused on pure line and volume. 

 

Intensified though the close focus on the head of the sitter here and the rhythmic background of animated broken brushwork that she is set against, Tête de jeune fille (Louise) evidences the same sculptural approach taken by the painter in these years, his “gradated use of black paint” immediately effective in bringing out the more lively, luminous quality of her flesh.^vi Establishing the geometric simplification, elongated forms, and stylized facial features that would come to define the artist’s work, in Tête de jeune fille (Louise) Modigliani strikes a perfect balance between the expressive and reduced volumes of African sculpture with the specificity of his sitter, charging this portrait with a remarkable and disarming poignancy.  

 

We would like to thank The Modigliani Initiative for their contributions to the bibliography of this work.

 

 

ⁱ  Sophie Krebs, “Modigliani & Paris,” in Modigliani, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2017, p. 21. 

ⁱⁱ  Anette Kruszynski, Amedeo Modigliani: Portraits and Nudes, London, 2000, p. 36. 

ⁱⁱⁱ  Amedeo Modigliani, quoted in Krebs, p. 23. 

^iv Simonetta Fraquelli, “A Personal Universe: Modigliani’s Portraits and Figure Paintings,” in Modigliani and his Models, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2006, p. 33.  

^v Carl Einstein, quoted in Marc Restellini, ed., Modigliani: The Primitivist Revolution, exh. cat., The Albertina Museum, Vienna, 2021, p. 171. 

^vi  Kruyszynski, p. 42.