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Artist or Maker: Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)

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Description: Portrait de Jeanne Hébuterne
signed 'Modigliani' (upper right)
oil on canvas
21 5/8 x 15 in. (55 x 38 cm.)
Painted in 1919

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Provenance: Leopold Zborowski, Paris.
Paul Guillaume, Paris.
Jonas Netter, Paris and thence by descent to the present owner.

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Exhibited: Iwate, Modigliani et ses amis chez Zborowski, 1993-1994; this exhibtion later travelled to Niigata, Mitsukoshi Museum; Gumma, Ota Museum; Osaka, Navio Museum; Kashiwa, Takashimaya Museum and Hiroshima, Fukuyama Museum.
Lausanne, Fondation de l'Hermitage, Les Peintures de Zborowski, Modigliani, Utrillo, Soutine et leurs amis, June - October 1994, no. 11 (illustrated in colour p. 52).
Chiba, Kawamura Museum, Modigliani et son époque, Paris 1910-20, April - May 1997, no. 8 (illustrated in colour p. 38 and again on the back cover); this exhibition later travelled to Osaka, Kinetsu Museum of Art, June; Yamagata, Yamagata Museum of Art, July - August; Niigata, Niigata Municipal Museum of Art, September - October; Miyazaki, Miyazaki Prefectorial Museum of Art, November - December; Kitakyushu, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, December 1997 - January 1998 and Tokyo, Daimaru Musuem of Art, January - February 1998.

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Published: L. Piccioni & A. Ceroni, I dipinti di Modigliani, Milan, 1970, p. 105, no. 330 (illustrated pl. IL).
J. Lanthemann, Modigliani, Catalogue raisonné, sa vie, son oeuvre complet, son art, Barcelona, 1970, p. 133, no. 374 (illustrated p. 258).
C. Mann, Modigliani, London, 1980, p. 214 (illustrated p. 195).
O. Patani, Amedeo Modigliani, Catalogo generale, Dipinti, Milan, 1991, no. 342 (illustrated in colour p. 332).

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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

Painted in 1919, Portrait de Jeanne Hébuterne is an elegant and intimate portrait of Modigliani's common law wife, who was arguably his most important sitter. With her distinctive blue eyes, auburn hair and graceful, swan-like neck, Jeanne was the perfect model and muse for an artist obsessed with the idea of timeless, universal beauty. Modigliani's paintings of Jeanne rank amongst his most sensitively executed and elegant renditions of feminine beauty, reflecting the rich influence that she had, both as a sitter and as a companion, on the artist during the final years of his life.

Modigliani's intensely spiritual and psychological portraits, especially of Jeanne, combine several threads from his work. On the one hand, the artist has managed to capture his companion's essence on the canvas, while he has also captured a timeless essence of female, and even maternal, elegance. In the years preceding the First World War, Modigliani had already emerged as an artist who accepted no compromise in his search for grace and beauty in painting. Against the backdrop of largely conceptual and intellectual movements such as Cubism, Modigliani sought an art that spoke to the soul. He was himself an able philosopher, but believed that the artist was a privileged seer, honour-bound to share an exclusive vision. His focus on the eyes of his sitters, for instance Jeanne's pool-like eyes in Portrait de Jeanne Hébuterne, itself reflects this interest in seeing. This picture shows the marriage between the personal history of the artist and his sitter, and the universal grace that he believed Jeanne possessed, emphasized by the fact that the pair were a family, a source of great wonder to the artist.

Initially, he had hoped to capture this spiritual and artistic grace in his sculptures, yet here he was obliged to accept one single, significant compromise. Suffering from tuberculosis, Modigliani lacked the strength to execute his sculptures as satisfactorily as he hoped, and was convinced into taking up painting with more enthusiasm. Modigliani had always been a painter as well, but now focused his sculptural discoveries into his oils. Beautiful, ethereal elongated figures featured in his paintings of women especially, recalling the Caryatides, but were usually presented with a slightly fractured appearance, often in thick and impastoed oils. A great breakthrough came when, at the end of the First World War, Modigliani abandoned the planar, quasi-Cubistic approach that had characterized his pictures during the previous years. Likewise, he abandoned the thick paints of his earlier works, favouring the thinner oils which add to the serenity of Portrait de Jeanne Hébuterne and avoid the material distraction incurred by heavy impasto.

Portrait de Jeanne Hébuterne retains a sculptural quality, but it is greatly diminished from the abrupt and deliberate three-dimensionality of the earlier paintings. Modigliani has deliberately contrasted the thinner, dappled oils of the mirage-like background with the more concentrated paint with which he has captured Jeanne, emphasizing her solidity. The tonal modulation of the collarbone, the neck and the face recall Seurat's Pointillism in their intensity and subtlety, lending the picture depth and thrusting Jeanne further into the world of the viewer. This intense visual erudition is also at work in the elongated and strikingly simple features that recall the African and Oceanic sculpture that had influenced some of Modigliani's earliest artistic discoveries and ideas, yet this influence is merged with those of the Old Masters. In the curve of the neck and the expression of Jeanne's face, it is clear that Modigliani has in mind paintings of the Madonna.

The ornamental bedstead, visible in Portrait de Jeanne Hébuterne as well as its larger sister picture, now in the Israel Museum, echoes both the Gothic thrones of Italian depictions of the Madonna and the Baroque world that increasingly flavoured Modigliani's quest for beauty. In removing the quasi-Cubistic elements of his art, Modigliani was painting pictures that were more overtly sensual, celebrations of the sitters, and especially the women, in their own right. Indeed, Jeanne often features in his work almost as an ideal woman. This link to the Israel Museum painting, which shows a visibly pregnant Jeanne, shows that even in the present work the artist was noting with his habitual wonder the physical changes that she underwent.

Modigliani met Jeanne while he was attending some life drawing classes in 1917; she was also attending as a young student. After several extremely turbulent relationships with strong and demanding women, Modigliani was driven to the beautiful and adoring Jeanne. Unlike his previous lovers, Jeanne worshipped Modigliani unquestioningly. The pair were soon living together, and only shortly after that, Jeanne found that she was pregnant. Although Modigliani was still an enfant terrible, crawling from bistro to bistro on epic drunks and smoking cigarettes and hashish despite his worsening tuberculosis, he managed to preserve the semblance of a disciplined life. He began working more steadily than ever before, aware of the responsibilities he held both towards Jeanne and to his dealer and friend Zborowski. The simple grace that makes Portrait de Jeanne Hébuterne such an engaging picture reflects the relative stability of this all-too-brief period. This period ended abruptly early in 1920 with the death of the artist, who finally succumbed to the tuberculosis that had intermittently plagued him during his life; the following day, the grief-stricken and heavily pregnant Jeanne threw herself from a window, unable to cope with the loss.

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