Jeune femme assise

Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison were the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's first major benefactors and important leaders in the cultural affairs of their city. In 1918 the Harrisons made a large gift of twenty-eight modern American paintings to the Museum. They were also interested in Impressionist and Modern French art and in the 1920s and 1930s they actively sought out quality paintings and drawings in important Paris galleries with the guidance of the cubist painter André Lhote. They donated many of their acquisitions to the Museum, and the modern drawings they gave are among the finest to have entered the Museum's collection, including Impressionist works by Degas, Pissarro and Signac, and Cubist and other modern works by Braque, Chagall, Derain, Gleizes, Léger and Picasso. Their tastes were adventurous for the times and often met with criticism from fellow citizens and the press. In 1929, the year in which the present drawing was gifted, The Los Angeles Times recommended that the drawings hanging in the Museum's Harrison Gallery of Modern French Art be "thrown in the rubbish heap...Let us replace this rubbish with the splendors of our painters whom we understand." The Harrisons prevailed, and in time their connoisseurship was acknowledged by all to have been an indispensable asset in shaping the Museum's modern collections.

In 1931 the Harrisons made provision for their gifts to the Museum to be re-assessed for their significance within the wider context of the Museum's collections after twenty-five years, and thereafter every ten years, so that some works might be de-acquisitioned and other newer works acquired in their place. It is under this generous and forward-looking policy that the present watercolor by Modigliani is here offered for sale to benefit the Museum's acquisitions fund.