A Cigarette, a Tube of Paint, a Glass of Wine: Amedeo Modigliani Paints Anna Zborowska

“How interesting it was to witness the birth of a painting!” wrote Anna (Hanka) Zborowska in her notebooks recounting the years she spent with her partner, art dealer Léopold Zborowski, and the artist Amedeo Modigliani.¹ Zborowska had a front-row seat to the painter at work. She was among Modigliani’s most frequent models and sat for numerous painted and drawn portraits between 1916 and the artist’s untimely death, in 1920, at the age of 35.

In Modigliani’s 1917 Anna Zborowska, she is painted almost life-size. Her body extends diagonally across the entire composition, her head nearly touching the top of the canvas. Her right elbow abuts the left edge and the skirt of her black dress billows out toward the viewer, beyond the boundaries of the frame. She reclines slightly on what may be a divan; behind her the background is a fiery abstraction of red, orange, brown, and blue brushstrokes. The glowing skin of her face, neck, and hands stand out from the rest of the painting. While they capture her individuality, they are also imbued with Modigliani’s signature style. He lengthened her face and neck and simplified her features: Her eyes are two sharp ovals filled in with black, and a single line describes the curve of her left eyebrow and continues down her face to form the ridge of her long nose and the flare of her nostril. She is elegant and refined, yet her relaxed pose and slight smile invites a closeness and indicates her familiarity with the painter. We can imagine them sitting across from each other in friendly conversation.

Beginning in 1917, the largest room of the apartment that they shared at 3 rue Joseph Bara was turned into a studio for Modigliani. There, the artist was supplied with canvas, paint, and a stipend of 15 francs per day, in exchange for Zborowski’s exclusive handling of his work. At the time, Zborowski had no physical gallery space, so the sale of paintings by Modigliani and other artists with whom he had contracts was also managed within the domestic setting of their apartment. Zborowska helped take care of the artists, conducted correspondence, tracked payments and finances, and brought purchased paintings to patrons.⁴ She also posed, especially when there were no funds to pay for professional models. In addition to Modigliani, her portrait was painted by André Derain, Moïse Kisling, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, and Maurice Utrillo, among others.

Given Zborowska’s central role in this crucial modernist scene, it seems fitting that Modigliani’s 1917 portrait of her was purchased in 1929 by Lillie P. Bliss, one of the three visionary women who founded MoMA that same year. Upon Bliss’s death in 1931, she left the painting to MoMA as part of the extraordinary bequest that helped shape the Museum we know today.