A Head 1915

This is Amedeo Modigliani’s painting, A Head, located in the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris. The head emerges like an apparition from a deep teal-colored space. Painted in a rusty, red-orange hue, it’s as if the figure is struggling to materialize onto the canvas. I think about how Modigliani may have been thinking, maybe each brushstroke was a delicate dance between presence and absence. The application of the paint is thin, almost translucent. It is as though the color has been breathed onto the surface, creating a soft, diffused effect. The single white eye is particularly striking, cutting through the painting’s darkness like a beam of light. Modigliani’s work makes me think about other painters like Paula Modersohn-Becker and Henri Matisse, especially how they rendered figures with such warmth. As painters we are always in conversation with one another, even across time. Painting is this embodied expression that embraces ambiguity. The way the image reveals itself can suggest so many different interpretations.