Portrait of Mrs Hastings, 1915 by Amedeo Modigliani

This painting, Portait of Mrs. Hastings, was painted on 1915 on a paper board. This painting shows clearly the influence of African sculpture. These imperatives are part and parcel of a system of values which is not imposed on the artist from without but to which he willingly subscribes. Distortions and anomalies of perspective all have their place in a self-sufficient hierarchy and a spiritual re-organization of the visible world in which every seeming constraint has its purpose and a profound significance.

Subjective and wholly personal as tiiose derogatory opinions are, we may well suspect them of being often founded not so much on an appraisal of the works themselves as on circumstances having no direct bearing on them. There has been, for example, an attempt to ascribe their special qualities to the fact that Modigliani was of Jewish descent. One historian of modern art, who cannot for a moment be suspected of racial prejudice in any form and whose admiration for Modigliani is expressed in many pages of excellent criticism, concludes his study of the artist with a curious pronouncement.