Amedeo Modigliani was an Italian painter who came to Paris in 1906 - like Chagall, one of the immigrant artists who made Montparnasse the centre of the avant-garde world.
His nudes caused an immediate scandal when first shown in 1917 - the police shut the show down within hours of opening, citing obscenity.
The source of the scandal was not the nakedness but the pubic hair, rendered with the same frankness as everything else - while academic nudes were hairless, Modigliani's nudes were real.
Modigliani died in 1920 at 35, of tubercular meningitis - having spent his entire adult life in Paris, in poverty, surrounded by the great artists of the century.
His companion Jeanne Hébuterne, pregnant with their second child, threw herself from a window the day after his death.
While his work was almost entirely ignored during his lifetime, his style is now unmistakable and his paintings invaluable - with the figures' elongated necks, oval faces, almond eyes with no pupils, a warm ochre palette.
The influence of African sculpture and Cézanne are both present, but absorbed into something entirely personal.
Fun fact : today his nudes are among the most expensive paintings ever sold - one of his reclining nudes sold in 2015 for $170 million.
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