Cendrars renewed his friendship with Fernand Léger in 1916, after both men came back from active service; the two had first become close in 1912 but lost contact during the war years^[1]. Cendrars went on to collaborate with Léger and the filmmaker Abel Gance on the 1923 film La Roue, and later worked with Léger on the ballet La Création du monde. His wartime injury, the loss of his right arm at Navarin Farm in the Champagne offensive, forced him to relearn writing with his left hand, a disruption that shaped his working life through the years he sat for this portrait.

By 1917 Modigliani's circle of friends had widened well past the earlier core of Max Jacob and Jacques Lipchitz to include Chaïm Soutine, whose portrait Modigliani painted several times that same year, most famously on a studio door belonging to their shared dealer Léopold Zborowski^[1]. Cendrars moved in the same overlapping world of poets and painters, and portraits of writers by their painter friends, exchanged rather than commissioned in the conventional sense, were common currency in this milieu.