Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz: Modigliani’s Portrait of Friendship

Two people sharing a narrow canvas

Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz is an oil painting on canvas made in 1916 by Amedeo Modigliani. It depicts the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz standing beside his seated wife, Berthe Kitrosser, a poet. The picture measures 81.3 by 54.3 centimetres and belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago. Its narrow upright format turns a simple commission into a demanding arrangement: two distinct people must occupy the same image without becoming unrelated portraits placed side by side.

The standing and seated positions immediately establish different heights. Lipchitz’s hand on Berthe’s shoulder connects their bodies across that difference. This is a visible point of contact, but it need not be translated into one definitive account of their marriage. A double portrait shows a relationship through pose and arrangement while leaving much about the actual people outside the frame. The distinction between pictorial organisation and a complete psychological history matters throughout this work.

A commission that also offered assistance

The Art Institute’s account on Google Arts & Culture connects the commission with Lipchitz’s wish to help Modigliani financially around the time of his marriage. According to the sculptor’s later recollection, the painter made preparatory drawings rapidly and soon considered the picture finished. Lipchitz then encouraged further work so that the sittings could continue to support his friend. The account is valuable testimony from a participant, but it remains a recollection rather than a minute-by-minute studio record.

This story changes the meaning of patronage. The person commissioning the work was not simply a distant purchaser seeking an elegant possession. He was a fellow artist using a paid commission to offer practical help. Friendship and payment need not cancel one another; here, the transaction gave assistance a professional form. The portrait therefore belongs to a network of exchange in which images, money and personal loyalty could be closely connected.

Italian training before the Paris years

Modigliani grew up in a Jewish family in the Tuscan port of Livorno. He studied locally with Guglielmo Micheli, then continued his artistic education in Florence and Venice. These beginnings matter because Paris did not replace an empty background. Italian painting had already offered him ways of organising bodies, drawing a continuous contour and giving a figure dignity without describing every surrounding object. Looking at earlier art was part of his education, not an obstacle to becoming modern.

The Thyssen-Bornemisza biography traces this training and his later independence from artistic movements. Rather than treating Renaissance influence as a claim that he copied a particular master, notice the broader problem he inherited: how can a body fill a picture convincingly? In his mature portraits, the answer often lies in the relation between head, shoulders and frame, rather than in detailed perspective.

Paris as a network rather than a single school

He arrived in Paris in 1906, first living in Montmartre and later working in Montparnasse. The term École de Paris describes an international artistic environment, not a class with one teacher or a movement with one manifesto. Artists arriving from different countries shared studios, dealers, exhibitions and friendships while producing markedly different work. Modigliani’s Italian identity and Jewish background belonged within that diversity; they should not be reduced to a convenient explanation for every painted face.

He knew Pablo Picasso, but proximity did not make him a follower. Cubist experiments showed that a portrait could depart from conventional likeness; Modigliani generally preserved a continuous human silhouette rather than breaking it into intersecting planes. Cézanne’s example also mattered to him. The useful comparison concerns structure: a head can be built through colour and proportion while remaining recognisably the head of a particular person.

Why sculpture is essential to understanding the paintings

For several years, sculpture was a central ambition. Contact with Constantin Brâncuși encouraged his search for simplified, concentrated forms. His carved heads bring long noses, narrow faces and reduced eyes into a three-dimensional arrangement. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection dates his principal sculptural activity to 1909–1914. He also exhibited sculpture at the Salon d’Automne in 1912, so this work had a public presence during his lifetime.

His sources included African sculpture and the art of antiquity. These are broad categories containing many different traditions, not interchangeable examples of a supposedly universal primitive style. In looking at the heads, distinguish their sources from his transformation of them. A carved nose establishes a strong vertical axis; an eye becomes an incision or a shape. Painting later allowed him to translate such economy into contour, colour and the meeting of adjacent surfaces.

Preparation and the misleading appearance of ease

The preparatory drawings are important because a flowing painted line can suggest that no planning was required. A double portrait demands choices about the relative scale of heads, the space between bodies and the direction of gestures. Trying possibilities on paper allows the painter to establish relationships before resolving them on canvas. Speed in execution does not mean absence of observation or thought. The apparently simple result can depend on decisions that are no longer separately visible.

Different faces within a common structure

Both faces belong to Modigliani’s simplified vocabulary, yet the two figures are not interchangeable. Compare their proportions, their position in relation to the surrounding space and the way their clothing supports the silhouettes. The shared style creates unity, while differences prevent the pair from becoming duplicates. Looking at both faces in succession is more informative than deciding in advance that a mask-like treatment removes all individuality. Simplification can direct attention to distinctions rather than erase them.

What comparison with single portraits reveals

In Jeanne Hébuterne with Bare Shoulders, one sitter’s head, neck and shoulders organise the encounter. In the Lipchitz portrait, attention must move between two people. The problem is therefore not simply repeated twice. Each figure changes the space available to the other, and each head becomes a point of comparison. Their relationship is built into the structure of the image, even before the viewer learns who they were.

Madame Pompadour, also in Chicago, raises uncertainty about the model’s identity. Here, the names and the history of the commission provide a firmer identification. Comparing the works shows how different kinds of evidence operate: known names do not remove interpretive questions, while an uncertain name does not prevent formal understanding. We can know who is present and still debate what the arrangement suggests about the relationship between them.

From an act of support to a preserved relationship

The painting entered the Art Institute in 1926 as part of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection. Another object records the friendship from the opposite direction: Lipchitz was involved in preserving Modigliani’s death mask in 1920. The Norton Simon Museum’s account of the mask connects it to their close relationship. The portrait and mask have different purposes: one presents living companions together, while the other preserves the face of a friend after death.

Return finally to the distance between the two heads and the hand that links the figures. These visible relationships allow the commission’s history to meet its pictorial form. The result is neither merely a document of financial assistance nor a generic image of marriage. It is a particular arrangement of two identified people made within a friendship among artists, and its enduring interest comes from keeping those material, social and visual dimensions together.