Portrait of a Woman 1919

Amedeo Modigliani painted this "Portrait of a Woman" with oils on canvas. He approaches portraiture with such a stylized ease, which only comes through repeated practice. Modigliani is all about reductive forms here. Look at the paint itself, like a skin stretched thinly over the canvas. There are no eyeballs in this face, just blank ovals, giving the portrait a mask-like quality. It's like he's asking us to look beyond the surface, to see something deeper, maybe even something unknowable. There’s a real economy to his marks, but somehow he still manages to convey so much with so little. I’m thinking of Picasso’s early portraits too; a similar paring down, a search for the essential. It makes you wonder, what is a portrait anyway? Is it about capturing a likeness, or is it about something else entirely? Something more mysterious, more open to interpretation?