Lot Essay
In the spring of 1918, Modigliani's dealer Leopold Zborowski moved a troupe of his protegés and their closest companions from Paris to the south of France (fig. 1) in order to escape the bombardment of the capital by the German army. Soutine, Foujita, Fernande Barrey and Hanka Zborowski were all included, and Modigliani was accompanied by the pregnant Jeanne Hébuterne and her mother. The trip was almost thwarted at the outset by Modigliani's last-minute search for wine in the train station in Paris; Foujita and Zborowski looked all over the station as the conductor yelled "En voiture," until Foujita found the artist in the cafeteria buying bottles of wine to drink on the train.
In the south of France, the group first stopped at Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Nice. As Pierre Sichel explains:
The Zborowskis along with Jeanne and her mother rented rooms at Le Pavillion des Trois Soeurs, a villa owned by a crusty old eccentric known as Papa Curel. It was set high on a hill in back of the village of Cagnes, two miles from the water, with a good view of the Mediterranean. For the moment Modigliani was housed in an adjoining villa, farther up the hillside, with Foujita, Fernande and Soutine. The eighty-year-old Curel claimed to have known many artists and supposedly understood their ways.
From bits and pieces of evidence we can assume that Modigliani was furious at being separated from Jeanne, and not even remotely tactful to Madame Hébuterne. The constant, bitter arguments must have tried Jeanne in the extreme. In such an atmosphere it does not seem possible that Modigliani could paint. Yet Madame Zborowski assured Douglas Goldring that he did, and well. "Indeed, he had always worked passionately. Nobody could reproach him on that score. He would complete in a few days a picture that would take most men weeks or months to accomplish," she said. (P. Sichel, Modigliani, London, 1967, p. 408)
Among the pictures which Modigliani made at Cagnes is a group of paintings depicting the children of the concierge of his villa. Of these pictures, one was formerly in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (fig. 2), another is in the John Herron Art Museum, Indianapolis, and a third is in a private collection (fig. 3). Modigliani, like so many Italians, was extremely sensitive to children. Lionello Venturi has suggestively described his late portraits of them:
At this time, Modigliani's attitude towards and the depiction of his models became calmer and more peaceful. The apprentice, the porter's son, the maid in Cagnes, little Maria, the two girls in Paris, all enter Modigliani's pictorial world with a sad dignity. Their interior vision, captured in a private dream, accentuates their solitude and at the same time enshrines their morality with a poetic halo. Their status in life is certainly not a happy one, but they possess nobility and moral values. They are the most convincing witnesses of the beauty and goodness of mankind. (L. Venturi, exh. cat., op. cit., Paris, 1981, p. 89)
The portraits of unknown sitters dating from 1918 are characterized by a sculptural quality not apparent in earlier works. The brushwork tends to waver between heavily worked areas in the essential parts of the composition and looser, broader strokes towards the edges of subjects. Whether the palette is somber or high-key, the technique remains the same. The present picture is especially remarkable for its color accents, such as the vivid red cheeks and ears and the bright blue-green eyes. The eyes harmonize chromatically with the intense green at the left, and the green and red form strong contrasts that vibrate in relation to one another. The bleached whites at the right heighten the brilliance of the whites of the boy's eyes; and the intense colors of his face and of the walls are set off in relation to the dark browns and blacks of the costume, chair and floor. The boy's gaze is direct and powerful, almost uncanny, simultaneously suggesting innocence and omniscience. His hands are clasped, as in the other portraits in the series, and yet they imply energy and restlessness rather than repose and quietude. The outlines of the figure waver slightly, increasing this feeling of tension. The unusual, high vantage point also adds to the sense of potential kinesis--it appears almost as if the boy is being pushed forward out of the fictive space into the viewer's. The nearly hallucinatory intensity of the picture is increased still further by the fact that both the verticals and horizontals describing the walls and floor are imbalanced and off-axis; moreover, the juncture of the wall and floor is not perpendicular. The chair, with its distinctive curved back, appears in all these portraits, as here, silhouetting the sloped shoulders of the youth.
James Thrall Soby has commented on Modigliani's portraiture:
In his intensity of individual characterization, Modigliani holds a fairly solitary place in his epoch. One senses in his finest pictures a unique and forceful impact from the sitter, an atmosphere of special circumstance, not to recur. But he was far from being simply a realist. On the contrary, he solved repeatedly one of modern portraiture's most difficult problems: how to express objective truth in terms of the artist's private compulsion. The vigor of his style burns away over-localized fact. Indeed, his figures at times have the fascination of ventriloquists' dummies. They are believable and wholly in character, yet they would be limp and unimaginable without his guiding animation. (J.T. Soby, exh. cat., Modigliani: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1951, p. 10)
An early owner of the present work was the well-known collector Roger Dutilleul (fig. 4), who met Modigliani in the autumn of 1918. Dutilleul had an impressive collection of paintings by all the foremost modern painters and enjoyed showing them to the Italian. Modigliani was especially taken by a Picasso still-life, which prompted him to remark, "How great he is, he's always ten years ahead of the rest of us" (quoted in J. Rose, Modigliani, The Pure Bohemian, London, 1990, p. 201). Dutilleul commissioned a portrait, and Modigliani asked if he could have the Picasso in his room for inspiration while he painted it, along with sixty-five francs a day, plus the canvas and several bottles of wine.
Dutilleul became a great patron, amassing one of the most extensive and celebrated collections of Modigliani's paintings. It included La fille avec un béret (Ceroni, 1970, no. 244; Private Collection), Jeune femme assise devant un lit (Ceroni, 1970, no. 316; County Museum of Art, Los Angeles), Fils assis (Ceroni, 1970, no. 300; Musée d'Art Moderne, Villeneuve d'Ascq), and Femme assise avec un enfant (Ceroni, 1970, no. 334; Musée d'Art Moderne, Villeneuve d'Ascq), as well as portraits of Survage, Jeanne and Hanka Zborowski.
(fig. 1) Amedeo Modigliani, Paysage du Midi, 1919
Private Collection
(fig. 2) Amedeo Modigliani, Garçon à la veste bleue, 1918
Private Collection
(fig. 3) Amedeo Modigliani, Fillette au tablier noir, 1918
Private Collection
(fig. 4) Amedeo Modigliani, Roger Duttileul, 1918
Private Collection
In the south of France, the group first stopped at Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Nice. As Pierre Sichel explains:
The Zborowskis along with Jeanne and her mother rented rooms at Le Pavillion des Trois Soeurs, a villa owned by a crusty old eccentric known as Papa Curel. It was set high on a hill in back of the village of Cagnes, two miles from the water, with a good view of the Mediterranean. For the moment Modigliani was housed in an adjoining villa, farther up the hillside, with Foujita, Fernande and Soutine. The eighty-year-old Curel claimed to have known many artists and supposedly understood their ways.
From bits and pieces of evidence we can assume that Modigliani was furious at being separated from Jeanne, and not even remotely tactful to Madame Hébuterne. The constant, bitter arguments must have tried Jeanne in the extreme. In such an atmosphere it does not seem possible that Modigliani could paint. Yet Madame Zborowski assured Douglas Goldring that he did, and well. "Indeed, he had always worked passionately. Nobody could reproach him on that score. He would complete in a few days a picture that would take most men weeks or months to accomplish," she said. (P. Sichel, Modigliani, London, 1967, p. 408)
Among the pictures which Modigliani made at Cagnes is a group of paintings depicting the children of the concierge of his villa. Of these pictures, one was formerly in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (fig. 2), another is in the John Herron Art Museum, Indianapolis, and a third is in a private collection (fig. 3). Modigliani, like so many Italians, was extremely sensitive to children. Lionello Venturi has suggestively described his late portraits of them:
At this time, Modigliani's attitude towards and the depiction of his models became calmer and more peaceful. The apprentice, the porter's son, the maid in Cagnes, little Maria, the two girls in Paris, all enter Modigliani's pictorial world with a sad dignity. Their interior vision, captured in a private dream, accentuates their solitude and at the same time enshrines their morality with a poetic halo. Their status in life is certainly not a happy one, but they possess nobility and moral values. They are the most convincing witnesses of the beauty and goodness of mankind. (L. Venturi, exh. cat., op. cit., Paris, 1981, p. 89)
The portraits of unknown sitters dating from 1918 are characterized by a sculptural quality not apparent in earlier works. The brushwork tends to waver between heavily worked areas in the essential parts of the composition and looser, broader strokes towards the edges of subjects. Whether the palette is somber or high-key, the technique remains the same. The present picture is especially remarkable for its color accents, such as the vivid red cheeks and ears and the bright blue-green eyes. The eyes harmonize chromatically with the intense green at the left, and the green and red form strong contrasts that vibrate in relation to one another. The bleached whites at the right heighten the brilliance of the whites of the boy's eyes; and the intense colors of his face and of the walls are set off in relation to the dark browns and blacks of the costume, chair and floor. The boy's gaze is direct and powerful, almost uncanny, simultaneously suggesting innocence and omniscience. His hands are clasped, as in the other portraits in the series, and yet they imply energy and restlessness rather than repose and quietude. The outlines of the figure waver slightly, increasing this feeling of tension. The unusual, high vantage point also adds to the sense of potential kinesis--it appears almost as if the boy is being pushed forward out of the fictive space into the viewer's. The nearly hallucinatory intensity of the picture is increased still further by the fact that both the verticals and horizontals describing the walls and floor are imbalanced and off-axis; moreover, the juncture of the wall and floor is not perpendicular. The chair, with its distinctive curved back, appears in all these portraits, as here, silhouetting the sloped shoulders of the youth.
James Thrall Soby has commented on Modigliani's portraiture:
In his intensity of individual characterization, Modigliani holds a fairly solitary place in his epoch. One senses in his finest pictures a unique and forceful impact from the sitter, an atmosphere of special circumstance, not to recur. But he was far from being simply a realist. On the contrary, he solved repeatedly one of modern portraiture's most difficult problems: how to express objective truth in terms of the artist's private compulsion. The vigor of his style burns away over-localized fact. Indeed, his figures at times have the fascination of ventriloquists' dummies. They are believable and wholly in character, yet they would be limp and unimaginable without his guiding animation. (J.T. Soby, exh. cat., Modigliani: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1951, p. 10)
An early owner of the present work was the well-known collector Roger Dutilleul (fig. 4), who met Modigliani in the autumn of 1918. Dutilleul had an impressive collection of paintings by all the foremost modern painters and enjoyed showing them to the Italian. Modigliani was especially taken by a Picasso still-life, which prompted him to remark, "How great he is, he's always ten years ahead of the rest of us" (quoted in J. Rose, Modigliani, The Pure Bohemian, London, 1990, p. 201). Dutilleul commissioned a portrait, and Modigliani asked if he could have the Picasso in his room for inspiration while he painted it, along with sixty-five francs a day, plus the canvas and several bottles of wine.
Dutilleul became a great patron, amassing one of the most extensive and celebrated collections of Modigliani's paintings. It included La fille avec un béret (Ceroni, 1970, no. 244; Private Collection), Jeune femme assise devant un lit (Ceroni, 1970, no. 316; County Museum of Art, Los Angeles), Fils assis (Ceroni, 1970, no. 300; Musée d'Art Moderne, Villeneuve d'Ascq), and Femme assise avec un enfant (Ceroni, 1970, no. 334; Musée d'Art Moderne, Villeneuve d'Ascq), as well as portraits of Survage, Jeanne and Hanka Zborowski.
(fig. 1) Amedeo Modigliani, Paysage du Midi, 1919
Private Collection
(fig. 2) Amedeo Modigliani, Garçon à la veste bleue, 1918
Private Collection
(fig. 3) Amedeo Modigliani, Fillette au tablier noir, 1918
Private Collection
(fig. 4) Amedeo Modigliani, Roger Duttileul, 1918
Private Collection