Woman with earrings (Girardin bequest)

Identification

Published titles

English: Woman with earrings / Woman bust / Unknown woman.

Date

1917?

Medium

Oil on canvas?

Dimensions

65 × 43.5 cm.

Signature

Signed modigliani at top right.

Present location

Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, inv. AMVP 1400 (legacy of Dr Maurice Girardin, 1953).

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. Maurice Girardin Collection, Paris (acquired between 1920 and 1925?).
2. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, inv. AMVP 1400, Girardin legacy 1953.

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 Cabanne, 1961.¹
• Joseph Lanthemann, 1970, no. 253.²
• Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Modigliani, 1981, p. 44.³

Exhibitions

• Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Passions privées, 1995–96.
• This investigation notes further exhibition and publication by Parisot, data still in process.

Notes

This investigation marks the work as not located in the D’Atri papers.

Museum file text as printed in this investigation: “Work long time attributed to Modigliani which we know today that it is a forgery.”

The 1981 study conducted by the Réunion des Musées de France, published in the museum’s 1981 Modigliani catalogue, pp. 20–47, concluded that the work was a forgery on the grounds that the X-ray showed no similitude with other Modigliani paintings and that the pigments did not coincide. Those findings are reported as published.

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.