HAPPY THROWBACK PORTRAIT MONDAY!

For today's portrait Monday we bring you the Italian expert of Modern portraiture Amedeo Modigliani, known for his elongated faces with small features and sparse backgrounds.

A combination of renaissance and post-impressionist influences informed Modigliani's work, and after moving to France he became peers with artist Pablo Picasso and Romanian sculptor Brancusi, both of whom looked to African masks as source material.  This led to a series of elongated facial sculptures which he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1908.  After 1915 Mondigliani stuck primarily to painting, combining what he had learned through his colleagues and his sculptures by eliminating almost all shading and rendering into something that became flat and graphic in nature.  He is still known today for these simplified portraits.