Banned by the police: the true stories behind Modigliani's languorous nudes

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This works well when it comes to Modigliani’s most significant love affairs. He didn’t shy away from falling in love with women with as much personality as he had, and there are three very interesting women to explore. Two of these, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and the South African-born British journalist Beatrice Hastings, were at least as professionally successful as he was. He met Akhmatova, who was married at the time, in 1910, and their affair lasted for more than a year. At this point he was a penniless sculptor, haunting the building sites of Paris by night in search of limestone. Of his isolation she recalled: “Everything in Modigliani only sparkled through a kind of darkness … He seemed to me encircled with a dense ring of loneliness.” They walked in the rain and recited Verlaine to each other. He drew her repeatedly and one of the few surviving drawings appears in the Tate exhibition. There is something otherworldly about her, reclining in bed: her hair forms a kind of halo and the sheet around her legs gives her the appearance of a mermaid.

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