+ Expand
Provenance: Georges Schick, Paris.
Perls Gallery, New York.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, London, 7 December 1977, lot 81.
Hammer Galleries, New York.
Private collection (acquired from the above, 1989).
Anon. sale, Christie's, New York, 8 November 2000, lot 50.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
+ Expand
Exhibited: Tokyo, Galerie des Arts de Tokyo, Modigliani, Utrillo, Kisling, August-September 1980, no. 10 (illustrated).
New York, Hammer Galleries, 19th and 20th Century Impressionist and Modern Masters, May-August 1989, pp. 16-17 (illustrated).
+ Expand
Literature: A. Ceroni and L. Piccioni, I dipinti di Modigliani, Milan, 1970, p. 95, no. 150 (illustrated).
O. Patani, Amedeo Modigliani, catalogo generale: dipinti, Milan, 1991, p. 166, no. 153 (illustrated).
+ Expand
Notes: Although Modigliani is today most famous for his nudes, in his time and among his circle of friends the artist was known first and foremost as a portraitist. The great majority of his paintings are in fact portraits, and while most of these pictures are of women and girls, outnumbering his male subjects by more than two to one, Modigliani's portraits of men provide indispensable insights into the life and work of the man, not as the handsome and fabled lover of women, but as the dedicated modernist painter. These portraits reveal the individual friendships that Modigliani valued, and tell of the camaraderie within his circle that nourished and stimulated his art. Shorn of any concessions to prettiness and affectation, these paintings permit the viewer to discern most clearly the stylistic elements which Modigliani absorbed and contributed in turn.
Portrait du photographe Dilewski is one of an important group of several dozen portraits that Modigliani painted in 1915-1916, which comprise a roster of now famous and otherwise lesser-known artists, writers, dealers and collectors who lived and worked in bohemian Montparnasse during the period of the First World War. James Thrall Soby has written: "Taken as a whole, though each is idiosyncratic, Modigliani's portraits constitute the gallery of an era and of a world, the last real Bohemia, before artists were obliged to share their favorite purlieus with a public envious of their license and gaiety" (in Modigliani, exh. cat. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1951, p. 10). Werner Schmalenbach has pointed out that "He painted so many people from this world that one is almost impelled to ask whom he not paint. Modigliani was part of this bohème in a highly personal and indeed an exemplary way. In the eyes of his contemporaries, he was--as he has remained--its epitome" (in Modigliani, Munich, 1990, p. 33). These portraits mark Modigliani's return to painting after concentrating almost exclusively on sculpture for several years, and they occupy a crucial phase in his stylistic development. Schmalenbach has declared: "These are the works with which Modigliani has earned his place in the history of art" (ibid.).
When Modigliani moved to Montparnasse from Montmartre in late 1908 or early 1909, the neighborhood had already earned a reputation as the center of avant-garde artistic life in Paris. Lively, sophisticated and cosmopolitan, Montparnasse was home to hundreds of artists and writers from scores of different countries. The Café de la Rotonde, situated on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, functioned as the principal gathering place for a group which included Modigliani, Picasso, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Chaïm Soutine, Jacques Lipchitz, and Max Jacob, among many others. An article in the 3 June 1917 issue of Le Cri de Paris described the atmosphere at the Rotonde: "It is a very welcoming establishment and a good place to sit down. It has been chosen as the headquarters by those men, the cubist painters. That is where they gather. That is where we can see their pope, Monsieur Picasso, surrounded by his cardinals, Messieurs Kisling, Modigliani, Ortiz de Zarate, etc. That is where their prophets Messieurs Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon establish their attack plans against the bourgeois spirit, and debate among themselves the most abstruse questions of pyramidal, spherical, cylindrical, and conical aesthetics" (quoted in K. Wayne, Modigliani & the Artists of Montparnasse, exh. cat., Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 2002, p. 21).
The highly charged artistic environment of Montparnasse, and the broad range of its cultural mix, stimulated the development of Modigliani's art. Born into a Sephardic Jewish family in the thriving Italian port of Livorno, a thoroughfare for traders from all around the Mediterranean, Modigliani possessed a cosmopolitan background that made him especially open to the richly eclectic inspiration of Montparnasse. His mature style, which crystallized in 1915-1916, incorporates a vast array of artistic influences, from the Renaissance painting of his native Italy, to the African and Egyptian art on display in the celebrated Montparnasse shop of the dealer Joseph Brummer. Kenneth Wayne has observed, "The internationalism of the Montparnasse artist's community is its single most defining characteristic and a key point to consider when evaluating the art that developed there in the early twentieth century... Of the many distinguished artists who worked in
Montparnasse, Modigliani had perhaps the widest range of discernible sources, making him the ultimate Montparnasse sophisticate and the quintessential figure of this extraordinary time and place" (ibid., pp. 16-17). Modigliani returned the favor of these many stimuli, and delighted in recording the many foreign faces in the cultural and artistic melting pot of Montparnasse.
Hardly anything is known today about the photographer Dilewski. He was surely more than a passing acquaintance to Modigliani--the artist portrayed him again in a very fine drawing dated October 1919 (Ceroni, 1965, no. 155; fig. 1). He was likely of Central or Eastern European origin, and one of the many émigrés from these countries who enriched the cultural life of Paris, to whom Modigliani was very partial, and some of whom would impact deeply on his career. The painter Moïse Kisling (Ceroni, no. 107; fig. 2) held open house gatherings in his Montparnasse studio where Modigliani mixed with fellow painters Chagall, Pascin, Soutine, and Utrillo, the sculptors Archipenko, Miestchaninoff (Ceroni, no. 153; fig. 3) and Zadkine, as well as the writers Francis Carco, Jean Cocteau and Max Jacob. It was through Kisling that Modigliani was introduced in 1915 to Léopold Zborowski (fig. 4), an aspiring young Polish poet who eked out a living selling books and rare manuscripts.
Zborowski had seen some paintings by Modigliani in a small show of portraits which Paul Guillaume had organized in the studio of the painter Emile Lejeune, a gathering place for artists known as the Salle Huyghens. Guillaume was the first reputable dealer to handle Modigliani's work, and he had been instrumental in getting the artist to concentrate on oil painting in 1915. Guillaume had little success with Modigliani's work, however, and he had grown impatient with Modigliani's difficult behavior and self-destructive habits. Fortunately, Modigliani's work made a singular impression on Zborowski, who approached the painter in March 1916 and offered to promote his work. His enthusiasm alone may have won over the painter; he made a contract with Modigliani, by which he paid the artist a daily stipend, covered the expenses of his materials and models, and arranged for a place where he could to paint undisturbed, all in exchange for the paintings that he finished. He also gave into Modigliani's demons, reluctantly furnishing whatever wine and other spirits Modigliani required to keep working. Although Zborowski was financially little better off than his new client, he would prove to be as selfless and dedicated an agent as any artist could hope for, as if he were on a mission, to help Modigliani find the fame and fortune both men believed was the painter's rightful due.
This strongly characterized and insightful portrait of Dilewski displays of all the signature traits of the male facial type that Modigliani developed during 1916: the graceful merging of a broad oval face into sloping shoulders, the indented elongation of the nose (most prominent in his sitters of Slavic origin), the small pursed lips, and the inscrutable almond-shaped eyes. Here he created an individual likeness that dwells affectionately on the salient features of his male sitter, while manifesting a manly, rough-hewn and granitic strength of character. By this time Modigliani had fully assimilated into his art a host of disparate sources, ranging from Italian Renaissance portraiture to African and Oceanic sculpture. Skillfully, and with apparent effortlessness, Modigliani balanced tradition and novelty, illusionistic volume and modernist flatness. Soby has pointed out that "In his intensity of individual characterization, Modigliani holds a fairly solitary place in his epoch... He solved repeatedly one of portraiture's most difficult problems: how to express objective truth in terms of the artist's private compulsion. The vigor of his style burns away over-localized fact" (op. cit.). Always true to reality, Modigliani preserved the essential likeness of the person who sat before him. No less true to himself, he described his sitter in a personal language that was compellingly subjective and intuitive. In an eloquent paean to his long-time friend, Jean Cocteau described Modigliani's singular achievement:
"It was not Modigliani who distorted and lengthened the face, who established its asymmetry, knocked out one of the eyes, elongated the neck. All of this happened in his heart. And this is how he drew us at the tables in the Café de la Rotonde; this is how he saw us, loved us, felt us, disagreed or fought with us. His drawing was a silent conversation, a dialogue between his lines and ours... We were all subordinated to his style, to a type that he carried within himself, and he automatically looked for faces that resembled the configuration that he required, both from man and woman. Resemblance is actually nothing more than a pretext that allows the painter to confirm the picture that is in his mind. And by that one does not mean an actual, physical picture, but the mystery of one's own genius" (quoted in D. Krystof, Amedeo Modigliani 1884-1920: The Poetry of Seeing, Cologne, 2000, p. 54).
(fig. 1) Amedeo Modigliani, Uomo con pipa e cappello (Ritratto di Dilewsky), 1919. Israel Museum, Jerusalem. BARCODE 27237472
(fig. 2) Amedeo Modigliani, Moïse Kisling assis, 1916. Sold, Christie's New York, 1 November 2005, lot 44. BARCODE 21605017
(fig. 3) Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait du sculpteur Oscar Miestchaninoff, 1916. Sold, Christie's New York, 6 November 2007, lot 47. BARCODE 26030173
(fig. 4) Amedeo Modigliani, Léopold Zborowski assis, 1916. Private collection. BARCODE 24410380
We're Hiring!
