Identification

Published titles

English: Chaim Soutine (painted on a door); Portrait of the artist Chaïm Soutine.

Date

1917? The 1955 Bern exhibition dated the work 1914.

Medium

Oil on a door panel. Parisot records canvas. Pfannstiel records wood.

Dimensions

78.7 × 54.3 cm. The original door is recorded as 193 × 78 cm. Parisot, Patani and MR: 79 × 54 cm. Wayne: 78.7 × 54.3 cm.

Signature

Unsigned.

Present location

Marlene and Spencer Hays Collection, Nashville. Bequest to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2016.

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. Private collection, Paris (circa 1955; the lower part of the door already lost).
3. Henri Bing Collection, Paris.
4. Nathan and Marion Smooke Collection.
5. Sale, Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg, New York, the Smooke Collection, 5 November 2001, sale NY856, lot 20 (estimate USD 600,000–800,000; sold USD 662,500).
6. Marlene and Spencer Hays Collection, Nashville.
7. Bequest to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2016.

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.

• Pierre Descargues, Amedeo Modigliani, Paris, Braun, 1951, pp. 20–21.
• Arthur Pfannstiel, 1956, no. 178.¹
• Ambrogio Ceroni, 1958, no. 133.²
• Joseph Lanthemann, 1970, no. 179.³
• Ambrogio Ceroni and Leone Piccioni, 1970, no. 217.⁴
• Christian Parisot, 1991, no. 20/1917.⁵
• Osvaldo Patani, 1991–94, no. 223.⁶
• MR, 2002, pp. 288–289, no. 57.⁷
• Kenneth Wayne, 2002, p. 40, pl. 19.⁸

Exhibitions

• Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1933, no. 88 (S. Zborowski, Paris).
• Basel, Kunsthalle, 1934.
• Bern, Kunsthalle, 1955, no. 4 (dated 1914).
• Paris, Musée du Luxembourg, 2002, no. 57; Milan, Palazzo Reale, 2003, no. 40.
• Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, Chaïm Soutine, 2012–13, no. 1.
• Paris, Musée d’Orsay, The Collection of Marlene and Spencer Hays, 2013.

Notes

D’Atri papers no. 88, portrait of Soutine painted on the old door of the Zborowski apartment; provenance Zborowski in 1933.

This investigation records that the portrait was painted on the door that separated the two artists’ studios in the dealer’s apartment at 3 rue Joseph Bara. A photograph of Léopold Zborowski seated in front of the door is reproduced. The painted field originally extended below the panel now known; the lower part is lost or unlocated. By about 1955 the lower wood was already missing.

Open records confirm the surviving panel as oil on a door, 78.7 × 54.3 cm, dated 1917. The 2016 bequest from the Marlene and Spencer Hays Collection to the Musée d’Orsay is kept as published; an Orsay inventory number was not located in this pass. A different canvas portrait of Chaïm Soutine, about 100 × 65 cm and often dated 1916, is not this door panel.

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