Madame Z (Hanka Zborowska)

Identification

Published titles

English: Hanka Zborowska / Mme Zborowska.
French: Jeune femme accoudée / Madame Z.

Date

1917? Pfannstiel 1956: 1918. Lanthemann: 1919. Patani: 1917.

Medium

Oil on canvas?

Dimensions

55 × 38.3 cm? Pfannstiel 1956 gives 55 × 37 cm.

Signature

Signed modigliani at top right. This investigation records the word Paris half visible at lower right in a high-resolution image.

Present location

Private collection?

Catalogue numbers

Legal note on MR: This investigation has not had access to MR’s catalogue raisonné; all research here is based on open sources, publications and exhibitions. By no means has that catalogue been copied at any point. Modigliani Project and Modigliani Initiative are marked YES when the work is published or otherwise recorded by those projects, even if no catalogue number is assigned; otherwise the field is marked ?.

Provenance

1. Léopold Zborowski, Paris.
2. Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, no. 22492, acquired 1 February 1921.
3. Paul Guillaume, Paris.
4. Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd., London, acquired from Guillaume 27 May 1924.
5. James Archdale, Birmingham, acquired December 1937.
6. Christie’s, London, Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, 22 June 2016, sale 11792, lot 11, sold £8,258,500 (estimate £5,000,000–7,000,000).
7. Private collection?

The sequence follows the published museum, sale, and catalogue record in this investigation. Gaps and uncertain transfers are marked as such.

Selected bibliography

Book-length publications are marked with a footnote giving a full citation. Exhibition catalogues appear in both this list and the exhibition list when this investigation recorded them in both places. Where this investigation listed a long run of secondary mentions, only the principal catalogues and museum or sale references are retained here.

• Waldemar George, La grande peinture contemporaine à la collection Paul Guillaume, Paris, 1929, pl. 148.
• Arthur Pfannstiel, 1929, p. 49.¹
• Arthur Pfannstiel, 1956, no. 298 (dated 1918).²
• Joseph Lanthemann, 1970, no. 393 (dated 1919).³
• Ambrogio Ceroni and Leone Piccioni, 1970, no. 178.⁴
• Osvaldo Patani, 1991–94, no. 184 (dated 1917).⁵
• Guy Patrice and Michel Dauberville, 2015, no. 17, p. 72, ill. p. 73, as Portrait de jeune fille.⁶

Exhibitions

• Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, La grande peinture contemporaine à la collection Paul Guillaume, 1929, as Madame Z.
• London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, La flèche d’or: Third Exhibition, 1937, no. 3 (dated 1918, as Madame Z).
• Birmingham, City Museum & Art Gallery, Exhibition of Modern French & English Paintings and Drawings, 1938, no. 10.
• Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal, James Archdale Collection, 1941.
• Loan to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, August 1940–September 1945.
• Birmingham, City Museum & Art Gallery, Works of Art from Midland Houses, 1953, no. 162.
• Loan to Birmingham City Museum & Art Gallery, 1978–2016.

Notes

This investigation is uncertain whether the work appears in the D’Atri papers.

An infrared image published in this investigation shows a soft contour drawing and a few corrections.

Holes are recorded at two corners; the others may have been covered by restoration.

Christie’s, London, 22 June 2016, sale 11792, lot 11, confirms Madame Hanka Zborowska, painted in 1917, sold for £8,258,500 (estimate £5–7 million). The house states that the canvas had been in the same collection since 1937 and on loan to Birmingham Museums from 1978.

The original documentation assembled for this investigation marked several fields as still being checked. The facts above are those already published; where sources disagree, both readings are given.