Reclining nude with loose hair

Identification

Published titles

English: Reclining nude with loose hair.
French: Nu couché aux cheveux dénoués.

Date

1917.

Medium

Oil on canvas.

Dimensions

60 × 92.2 cm? Parisot and Patani: 65 × 100 cm. MR: 60 × 92.2 cm. Pfannstiel: 62 × 100 cm.

Signature

Signed modigliani at top right in white (mixed with sienna or with a varnish layer over the signature).

Present location

Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, inv. 125.

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 Berthe Weill, Paris.
3. Galerie Bing, Paris (1925).
4. Pierre Loeb Gallery, Paris. MR records a Guillaume provenance in 1928–29.
5. Fukushima Collection, Tokyo (1928–29).
6. Yamamoto Collection, Japan.
7. Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, inv. 125.

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, p. 31; 1956, no. 188 (62 × 100 cm; collection unknown).¹
• Ambrogio Ceroni and Françoise Cachin, 1972, no. 195 (dated 1917).
• Christian Parisot, 1991, no. 43/1917 (the Osaka picture).²
• Osvaldo Patani, 1991–94, no. 203, as lost, 65 × 100 cm, with the published statement that the two copies known in Japan and the United States are forgeries.³
• MR, 2002, no. 53, pp. 292–93.⁴
• Mason Klein, 2004, p. 63, fig. 1, pl. 51 (60 × 92.2 cm).⁵

Exhibitions

• Paris, Berthe Weill, 1917? Galerie Bing, 1925 (this investigation notes that the painting is not visible in surviving installation photographs).
• Tokyo, Metropolitan Art Museum, 1947.
• Osaka and Tokyo, École de Paris, Daimaru, 1967–68, no. 38.
• Tokyo and Nagoya, 1985, Tokyo no. 83.
• Martigny, 1990, no. 72.
• Paris, Musée du Luxembourg, 2002, no. 59.
• New York, The Jewish Museum, 2004; Hakone, Pola Museum, 2014; Seoul, 2015.
• Villeneuve-d’Ascq, Budapest and Helsinki, 2016–17.

Notes

D’Atri papers no. 244, dated 1917, 62 × 100 cm, titled Nu couché, Zborowski 1929.

This investigation compares the plate in Pfannstiel 1956, no. 188, with the painting in Osaka and records displacements of contour in the cushion, eyes, lips and signature. This investigation states that only X-radiography and pigment analysis would settle whether the differences come from cleaning, from the printed plate, or from two supports. Patani’s published conclusion (lost original; Japanese and American versions as copies) and MR’s published acceptance of the Osaka picture are both recorded here as printed.

This investigation records the same sitter in other paintings of the series.

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