Female Head

Modigliani's relationship to the artistic experiments of his time - and still more to the masters of the past, of every age and country, from Archaic Greek to Bantu cultures, from the Sienese to Ingres, from Cézanne to Picasso - is subtle and baffling; rather than helping, it creates a certain disorientation in understanding his sensitive and refined art. His melancholy attachment (in art as in life) to a pessimistic notion of the transience of all things led him, almost by contrast, to an ironclad formal abstraction, authentically classical in spirit, lyrically sorrowful and anxious. Modigliani tends to disembody his images into pure geometric forms, as though the slow stripping away of their tormented physicality might realise them in a higher consistency and authenticity. Herein lies the meaning, at once mythical and passionate, of his concept of life as a gift: "from the few to the many; from those who know and have to those who neither know nor have".