Young Girl Seated 1918

Amedeo Modigliani made this portrait, Young Girl Seated, using oil paint on canvas. The appeal of Modigliani’s paintings is that they don’t fit squarely into any familiar category. The stylized approach to figuration places him in the general orbit of modernism, but there is also something very traditional about his practice. Modigliani had a strong academic training, grounding him in the Renaissance tradition, but he also moved within avant-garde circles in Paris, and was influenced by art from outside the Western canon. The surface texture of this canvas—built up with layers of paint—invites us to consider the physical process by which it was created. We can see the artist’s hand, through each brushstroke. His distinctive method involved building up layers of color to define form. The end result is a work that sits in a complex relationship to the history of painting, both craft and fine art. It demands that we see the labor and context embedded within it.