The Red-Headed Girl

When he painted this portrait, Modigliani had been in Paris for around ten years. In the French capital, his activities in search of the pure line led him to become passionate about the work of Cézanne and to frequent the Bateau-Lavoir, the hotbed of cubism, where he met Picasso, Derain, Vlaminck, Van Dongen, Laurens, Max Jacob and Apollinaire. Then, thanks to his doctor Paul Alexandre, who took him under his wing, he developed in interest in primitive art, visiting the collections of the Ethnographic Museum, the Guimet Museum and the Ethnographic sections of the Trocadéro Museum. He also made a full-time return to painting in 1915, after four years spent trying his hand at the more physical work of sculpture, at the insistence of Constatin Brancusi. His work, mainly centred on the human figure, can be divided into two different stylistic registers: on the one hand, portraits of friends and acquaintances, painted in a familiar and recognisable manner; and on the other, anonymous portraits, in which the desires of formal study take priority over the physiognomic or psychological definition of the models, who were often casual acquaintances from Parisian cafés that agreed to pose for the painter. Head of Red-haired Woman belongs to this second group. Revolving around warm tones, from browns to cinnabar, perhaps due to the influence of his friend Chaim Soutine and his scorching reds, this portrait displays all the characteristics of Modigliani’s painting. The absence of irises and pupils had become systematic in those years, due to the previous period of Cezannian portraits, in which the eye socket was synthetically resolved with a dark spot, and his sculptural work, in which every expressive definition through the canonical gaze was cancelled. More than a debt towards the synthetic language of cubism can be recognised in its bold formal simplification, from the oval of the face to the awkward definition of the bodily features, which reaches its culmination in the intersection of the eyes and nose, with the eyes brought asymmetrically closer and the nose incoherently profiled.