African Art Meets Paris

Modigliani's elongated figures emerged from his encounter with African and Oceanic sculpture at the ethnographic museum in Paris. Unlike Picasso, who broke African forms into Cubist geometry, Modigliani absorbed their elegant simplification into fluid, graceful figures.

He began as a sculptor, carving limestone heads influenced by Baule masks and Egyptian sculpture — long, narrow faces with tiny mouths and stylized noses. These carvings built the visual vocabulary he later translated into paint, keeping sculpture's sense of volume and weight.