Amedeo Modigliani

Modigliani painted elongated necks, almond eyes and blank pupils, and made variations on that one idea for a decade. The sources are African and Cycladic sculpture, which he studied while trying to be a sculptor, an ambition abandoned mainly because stone dust wrecked his already poor health.

The nudes caused his only solo exhibition in 1917 to be closed by police on its opening day for indecency, the offence being pubic hair rather than nudity itself.

He drank heavily, used drugs, lived in poverty in Montparnasse and died of tubercular meningitis at thirty five. His partner Jeanne Hébuterne, nine months pregnant, killed herself two days later. The biography has swallowed the work to some extent, which is unfortunate, because the portraits are far more subtle than the legend suggests.