Woman in a Yellow Dress

The female portrait, which is characterized by the melancholy gaze, the lively tone of the yellow dress and the arabesque backdrop, is part of that intense production season just before the premature death, at the age of 35, of Amedeo Modigliani (Livorno, 1884 - Paris, 1920), in which the salient features of his poetics are defined. The rhythmic force and the constructive function of the line are evident, worked out in contact with African sculpture and subsequently experimented directly by sculpting archaic stone heads. the work, which presents Matissian echoes, is the portrait of Renée Modot, wife of Gaston Modot, an amateur painter and well-known actor of Parisian cinema in the first half of the 20th century. The painting is one of the works presented at the posthumous retrospective curated by Lionello Venturi in in the context of the XVII Venice Biennale of 1930: the most cosmopolitan of Italian artists obtained the definitive, although late, consecration.