Portrait de Paul Alexanders 1913

Amedeo Modigliani painted this portrait of Paul Alexanders with oil on canvas at an unknown date. Modigliani's painting style is so distinctive - those elongated faces, the almond-shaped eyes - you can spot one of his works a mile off. There's a real sense of process here, you can almost feel the artist at work, moving around the canvas, adding a touch of colour here, a bold stroke there. The texture is what grabs me first; the paint isn't applied smoothly, but in layers, with visible brushstrokes that give the surface a tactile quality. Look at the way he's rendered the hand, so flat and almost cartoonish, and compare this to the detail in the beard, the subtle shifts in tone that give it shape and depth. The colour palette is so restrained, mostly browns, blacks, and creams, but then there's that flash of colour around the eye. Like a painting by Cezanne, Modigliani is less interested in realistic depiction than he is in the formal qualities of the medium itself.