Portrait of Jean Cocteau

The poet and impresario Jean Cocteau sits stiffly upright, his elongated neck, narrow shoulders, and mask-like face elegantly attenuated, his dandyish poise captured in a few spare, refined lines. Amedeo Modigliani applies his unmistakable stylization - the long oval head, the almond eyes - to one of the sharpest personalities of the Paris avant-garde. Now in a private collection, the portrait is among his finest likenesses, fixing the chic, brittle elegance of Cocteau while transforming him, as Modigliani did all his sitters, into a graceful, mannered icon of attenuated line and quiet melancholy.