Boy in short pants

Identification

Published titles

English: Boy in short pants.
French: Garçon au pantalon court / Le garçon en culottes.

Date

1918. The museum dates the canvas about 1918. Pfannstiel dated it 1917. Lanthemann dated it 1919.

Medium

Oil on canvas.

Dimensions

99.7 × 64.8 cm in this investigation (the Modigliani Project and Klein: 100.3 × 64.8 cm). The Dallas Museum of Art records sight dimensions of 98.43 × 63.5 cm (38¾ × 25 in.). Pfannstiel recorded 92 × 60 cm.

Signature

Signed modigliani at top right. This investigation records a double line in the signature.

Present location

Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, inv. 1977.1. Gift of the Leland Fikes Foundation, Inc., 1977. Oil on canvas; museum date about 1918.

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. Menier Collection, Paris.
3. Christie’s, London, 2 December 1975.
4. Acquavella Galleries, New York?
5. Leland Fikes Collection, Dallas.
6. Leland Fikes Foundation, Inc.
7. Dallas Museum of Art, inv. 1977.1, gift 1977.

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.

• Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, July 1925, p. 207.
• Waldemar George, L’Amour de l’art, Paris, 1925.
• Arthur Pfannstiel, 1929 presumed catalogue, p. 27.¹
• Arthur Pfannstiel, 1956, no. 170, 92 × 60 cm, dated 1917.²
• Joseph Lanthemann, 1970, no. 370, dated 1919.³
• Ambrogio Ceroni and Leone Piccioni, 1970, no. 255, dated 1918.⁴
• Kenneth Wayne, 2002, no. 25, p. 102, dated 1918.⁵
• Mason Klein, The Jewish Museum, 2004–05, p. 144, pl. 60.⁶
• Nancy Ireson and Simonetta Fraquelli, Tate Modern, 2017, p. 163.⁷

Exhibitions

• Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas Collects, 1978, p. 51, no. 88.
• Buffalo / Fort Worth, 2002–03, no. 25.
• Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Modigliani: Beyond the Myth, 2004–05.
• Washington, The Phillips Collection, 2005.
• Villeneuve d’Ascq, LaM, 2016.
• Budapest, Hungarian National Gallery, 2016.
• Helsinki, Ateneum, 2016–17.
• London, Tate Modern, 2017–18.

Notes

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

This investigation records holes at the corners of the canvas.

This investigation records a drawn ear painted over the colour.

This investigation records a double line in the signature and fingerprints at upper right on a high-resolution Dallas Museum photograph.

The verso, published by the Dallas Museum of Art, shows Paris customs export stamps.

Le Monde, 27 May 2016, reported that the Institut MR identified the sitter as Georges Menier, citing traces in the Menier archive at the Musée d’Orsay and the memoirs of Anna Zborowska. The same report quoted James Palmer to the effect that Philippe Maestracci had confirmed a friendship between his grandfather Oscar Stettiner and Georges Menier, and noted a 1919 portrait of Simonne Menier.⁸ This investigation also records a published comparison with a photograph of Rachele Osterlind.

The painting was already titled as a young boy in the 1925 Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration reproduction.

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.