Portrait of Henri Laurens 1915

This is Modigliani’s "Portrait of Henri Laurens," and it's all about how he lays down paint, immediate and sort of scrappy, like he's sketching with the brush. Look how the canvas peeks through those layers of ochre and grey. It's not about hiding the process, it's about the painting as an event, something that happens right there. The tie, this bold slash of black, anchors the whole composition. It’s almost brutal, a single stroke doing so much work. It’s like he's saying, "Here's the guy, but here's also the paint, the act of seeing and making." The painting shares a certain sensibility with someone like Marsden Hartley, where you see the raw energy, that same kind of honesty about what paint can do, not just what it can represent. Modigliani isn’t trying to give us the definitive Henri Laurens; he’s offering us a glimpse, a moment captured in the most direct way possible.