A suffering nude 1909

Amedeo Modigliani made this nude painting with oils on canvas, and what hits me first is the darkness, the suffering. You can imagine him, right? Hunching over, the raw canvas, working fast, trying to catch the figure emerging from the gloom. There’s a kind of urgency in the brushstrokes. The paint is brushed on quickly and thinly, like he’s desperate to get it down, to capture something fleeting. I bet he worked wet into wet, pushing the paint around to get those fleshy pinks and browns, the stark whites and blacks. The woman’s face is tilted back, her mouth open in an expression of… I don’t know, is it ecstasy or agony? Maybe it’s both. You see other artists like Munch doing something similar – getting at those raw, unnameable feelings. Artists are always stealing from each other, it’s a big conversation. It's like, "Hey, I see what you're doing, and I'm gonna take it and run with it in my own way." That's how art keeps moving, how we keep finding new ways to talk about the stuff that's hard to talk about.