By Nate Freeman
Amedeo Modigliani, Nu
couché (sur le côté gauche), 1917.
Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
In the 1990s, when curator
Kenneth Wayne narrowed his focus from Impressionist and modern artists to work
almost exclusively on the painter Amedeo Modigliani, some of his colleagues
didn’t understand the artist’s appeal. But Wayne loved how Modigliani, who
spent his upbringing worshipping the techniques of the Renaissance masters,
updated them to reflect the mindset of the burgeoning 20th century; the way he
blended elements of Surrealism, Fauvism, and Cubism into his own dreamy style.
“People would even tease
me: ‘Why are you working on him?’” Wayne recalled. “They were deriding it.”
No one is deriding his
choices these days. In 2015, the Chinese collector Liu Yiqian bought one of the
artist’s famed reclining nudes at Christie’s for $170.4 million, miles above
the $100 million estimate, making it, at the time, the second-most-expensive
artwork ever sold at auction. Next Monday, an even bigger and bolder reclining
nude, Nu couché (sur le côté gauche) (1917), will be auctioned at Sotheby’s
with the highest pre-sale estimate ever placed on a single work of art: $150
million.
One can understand Wayne’s
colleagues’ skepticism. Modigliani was a hashish- and opium-addled bohemian in
Paris in the 1920s who made mature work for just a few years, and then died of
tuberculosis in his thirties. He received little institutional attention
through the 1980s and ’90s (save for a small 1984 show at the National Gallery
of Art in Washington, D.C.), nor did he have the market presence of other
Impressionist and modern masters, who were selling for much more. At Sotheby’s
in May 1990, a masterpiece by Modigliani deaccessioned by the Guggenheim sold
for a record for the artist at $11.5 million, but at the same sale,
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876) sold for $78.1
million.
The work for sale on Monday
evening is guaranteed by a third party, who has placed an irrevocable bid on
the lot for an undisclosed amount near the estimate—ensuring that the painting
sells, and that the seller, Irish horse breeder John Magnier, walks away with a
hefty sum. But specialists at Sotheby’s think this nude of a curvy woman shown
from her backside could go much higher. It’s the auction house’s chance to make
headlines in a season when rival Christie’s looks set to sweep the Imp/mod
category, with its trove of Rockefeller masterpieces that have already raked in
$646 million and a rare Picasso self-portrait set to sell Tuesday for potentially
much more than its $70 million estimate. Still, this Modigliani could give
Sotheby’s the week’s biggest lot.
When the Modigliani
consignment was announced in April, former Christie’s chairman Brett Gorvy
compared it to the moment in 2017 when Sotheby’s beat Christie’s to the
last-minute consignment of a gigantic, electric-blue Jean-Michel Basquiat
painting of a skull by delivering its consignor a $65 million guarantee. That
painting ended up selling for $110 million, a record for an American artist.
“Sotheby’s hopes that
Modigliani’s bootylicious nude will create the same bling moment this May,”
Gorvy wrote on Instagram.
Simon Shaw, co-head
worldwide of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s, projected a cool
confidence that the work could beat expectations, which would place it among
the top five most-expensive works ever sold. His logic is simple: A record
price was set two and half years ago, and this Modigliani is bigger, and
better.
“We weren’t entering new
territory [with the estimate], as there’s a price comp of a smaller
nude—significantly smaller—that was sold three years ago at auction for $170
million,” Shaw said. “So that gave us a very clear point of reference.”
The $150 million Modigliani
set to be sold Monday was part of a series of nudes commissioned by the dealer
Leopold Zborowski in 1917, and caused quite a stir when they were first
exhibited in the Parisian gallery Berthe Weill. A policeman approached the
gallery and exclaimed, horrified, “These nudes…they have b-b-body hair!”
Scandalized, French authorities shut down the show. But it was this series that
commanded Modigliani’s highest prices in his lifetime. The most expensive one
that Zborowski sold went for 300 francs (or $60, which is the equivalent of
$1,097 in today’s dollars). After Modigliani’s death by tuberculosis, according
to Smithsonian magazine, Zborowski and the galleries that had work in their
inventories were selling his paintings for 10 times his highest prices—and then
getting flipped by the buyers for 10 times that. When adjusting those markups
for inflation, his work was selling for over $100,000 by today’s standard.
Plus ça change. The
reclining nudes from that show are still Modigliani’s most coveted works, as
they were enormously influential. Wayne explained that he was responsible for
modernizing the female nude, committing fully to placing the woman in a
contemporary context, rather than setting a nude in a historical context—say, a
Roman orgy—that would justify the nakedness. (He also added pubic hair, which
had rarely been depicted on female nudes.) Of the 22 paintings that Modigliani
made depicting nude, reclining women, 13 are in public institutions—the Barnes
Foundation in Philadelphia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the
Osaka City Museum of Modern Art all have one—meaning that the nude at Sotheby’s
is one of just nine left in private hands.
Magnier purchased this Nu
couché at auction in 2003 for $26.9 million, where it had been consigned by Las
Vegas casino magnate Steve Wynn (Wynn is in the process of stepping down from
his casino empire amid accusations of sexual assault). Wynn purchased it for an
undisclosed price from the family of Jonas Netter, an Alsatian trademarks agent
who had secured it from Zborowski in 1926, six years after the artist’s death.
Wayne credits this 458
percent rise in value in the past 15 years to the number of Modigliani museum
exhibitions over the last two decades, starting with the show he helped put
together at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in October
2002, which then traveled to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Shortly thereafter, the market began to
catch on, leading up to what was then a record-breaking sale of Wynn’s
Modigliani to Magnier.
“It took awhile for the
market to catch up,” Wayne said. “He was always considered a big name, but
there was a lull for some reason.” But the museum shows and subsequent
scholarly attention created a turning point in the market. By 2010, a
Modigliani sculpture sold for $57.7 million at Christie’s in Paris.
“One of his sculptures came
up in 1995 with an estimate of $1 to $2 million and it didn’t sell,” Wayne
recalled. “Fifteen years later, there are people battling it out.”
Shaw said that the timing
of the sale was canny, as the Tate Modern just staged a blockbuster show
devoted to Modigliani’s nudes, which Wayne said were indisputably the most
celebrated, and coveted, works in his oeuvre. Happily for Sotheby’s, Monday’s
Nu couché was on the cover of the Tate show’s catalogue, and was displayed on
ads for the exhibition that were pasted all over London. That give some
credence to the Sotheby’s selling point that this is simply the best Modigliani
nude.
“What is extremely unlikely
these days with great modern masters is to get an A-plus picture,” Shaw said.
“To be able to say, ‘Nobody in the world will ever be able to buy a better
example’ is something that, for artists like Van Gogh or Renoir or Monet,
you’re never able to say hand-on-heart. Here, this is the largest, most
ambitious picture he ever made. This is the last chance saloon.”
The work was first unveiled
in Hong Kong, and Shaw said there is a lot of interest in it from Asian
collectors. Yiqian, who bought the record-setting Modigliani nude in 2015,
placed that work in his private museum in Shanghai. Shaw also noted this nude
is the right nude for the #MeToo era, since it questions the relationship
between the gaze of the male painter and the agency of the naked female muse.
In this work, the viewer only sees her from behind, and the gaze is powerful
and direct—a revolutionary way to empower the female sitter in a portrait, and
a method, Shaw said, that was pioneered by Modigliani to reflect a new sense of
independence for Parisian women that came with the upheaval of World War I.
“She’s in charge—she’s very
much in control and in possession of her sexuality,” Shaw said. “In traditional
painting, across the centuries of the nude, there’s a particular kind of gaze
that’s implied between a male viewer and a to-some-degree objectified female
nude subject. Modigliani is trying to reverse that. She is the strong powerful
woman. It’s her gaze, in fact, that holds you.”
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-modigliani-nude-highest-pre-sale-auction-estimate-time?utm_medium=email&utm_source=13187295-newsletter-editorial-daily-05-11-18&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=st-
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