Pierre-Édouard Baranowski

Identification

Published titles

English: Pierre-Édouard Baranowski; Monsieur Baranowski.

Date

c. 1918 (museum). Pfannstiel dates the panel 1917.

Medium

Oil on hardboard. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco describe the support as a mixture of paper pulp, wood pulp and cloth pulp. This investigation had read the support as the cardboard usual in Modigliani.

Dimensions

62 × 45.5 cm (Pfannstiel: 64 × 49 cm).

Signature

Signed modigliani at top right.

Present location

de Young Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (inv. 1981.2.37). Gift of Marian Walter Sinton, 1981.

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. Jeanne Renouard (acquired from the above).
3. Galerie Zak, Paris.
4. Baron Adolphe Kohner Collection, Budapest (until 1934?).
5. K. Pogány, Ernst-Múzeum, Collection Baron Adolphe Kohner, 1934, lot 57.
6. Justin K. Thannhauser Collection, New York (by 1953).
7. Edgar Sinton Collection, Hillsborough, California.
8. de Young Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (inv. 1981.2.37), gift of Marian Walter Sinton, 1981.

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.

• Arthur Pfannstiel, 1929 presumed catalogue, p. 35.¹
• Arthur Pfannstiel, 1956, no. 215, as Baranowski, dated 1917, 64 × 49 cm; provenance Zborowski > Zak.²

Exhibitions

• San Francisco Museum of Art, 20th anniversary exhibition, 1955.
• San Francisco Museum of Art, Zacks exhibition, 1957.
• San Francisco Museum of Art, 25th anniversary exhibition, 1960.
• M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, The San Francisco Collector.

Notes

Not listed in the D’Atri papers?

Absent from Lanthemann, Ceroni and Patani. Included by MR and Wayne. A published conservation account records that the museum once treated the panel as a possible copy of the larger Baranowski portrait and later reinstated the attribution after technical examination. This page records that account; it does not reopen the attribution.

Holes are visible at the four corners. Fingerprints are visible in several areas of the paint.

The panel was later adhered to a rigid backing. This investigation records flattening of the original impasto during that process.

This investigation treats this head as a study for a larger seated Baranowski. Differences of pose, profile and handling are recorded without a conclusion as to sequence. Two further Baranowski portraits, supported respectively by Parisot and by MR, are cited for comparison.

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