It can be argued that Modigliani demonstrated an instinctual modernist understanding of identity as heterogeneous, beyond national or cultural boundaries,” writes the curator Mason Klein regarding the subject of “Modigliani Unmasked,” an exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Indeed it can be argued, in just the way that many people argue that no man-made thing can be understood properly unless it is first interpreted as a product of identity. Whether it ought to be argued is another matter.

“Modigliani Unmasked” makes much of the fact that the artist, a Jew expatriated to Paris from Livorno, identified as such, rather than passing as a French gentile when pervasive anti-Semitism would have made it advantageous to do so. The first room is given over to the earliest and weakest works in order to make that point. Alas, the title of The Jewess (1908), among the first pictures Modigliani exhibited after his arrival in Paris in 1906, might be its most striking feature. Bars of acid green around the sitter’s face betray Modigliani’s anxiety about the possibility of beating Matisse at his own game, a well-founded worry in this case. Her protracted nose hints tantalizingly at his later sculptures, with noses elongated still further and straightened into rulers. But this picture and a contemporaneous one of the same model, Nude with a Hat, the latter an off-putting caricature, her face jaundiced and jagged and her cartoonish breasts askew, show an artist still struggling to find his voice. A defiant sense of