Left: my tracing. Right: Amedeo Modigliani, a study for L’Amazone (The Amazon) — public domain (Modigliani d. 1920). Reproduced in the Kindle compilation Amedeo Modigliani: 140 Master Drawings. See Background.
This is a Modigliani drawing — a study for L’Amazone, the Amazon. What interests me is how few lines there are: a bit of shading, but the actual lines are simple, and often doubled. I take the outer one as the general idea — from my point of view it’s the actual silhouette; the inner line seems like a shade, perhaps.
He wants a very angular face — it almost has a cartoonish quality. I like the nose, so simple; I take only its center line. There’s a lot on the eyes. On the same page there’s another version with the eyes not filled in, so he was playing with that. The collar, the hair — I leave those. I’m studying the face more than those things, though this work, especially the final painting, has so much more than just this face.
I didn’t work in my usual order: I did the silhouette of the face first, where I’d normally start with the eyes. Since I was tracing, it perhaps didn’t matter — but it was because the face shape was so unique that it pulled my attention. It’s funny how much that one small line of the jaw affects the overall feeling: it helps to understand the back of the head; otherwise the face seems incorrectly flat.
One thing I noticed: the two eyes sit at different angles. Draw a line corner to corner and the far eye points down, the near eye up — more evident in my tracing than in his. Modigliani seems to be emphasizing it; it’s something to do with the higher-level abstraction of her expression. There’s all that shading in the original, of course, but I don’t think I’ll put it in.
Amedeo Modigliani, L’Amazone (The Amazon / Woman in a Yellow Jacket), 1909, oil on canvas, private collection — the painting these studies were for. Public domain.
Background. L’Amazone — the Amazon, in French also the word for a woman in riding dress — is Modigliani’s 1909 portrait of Baroness Marguerite de Hasse de Villers, an accomplished rider, worked toward through a run of head studies; this drawing is one of them. Modigliani kept repainting the jacket and finally settled on yellow-ochre, “a colour not worn by riders” — the result so unlike her that the Baroness refused the picture, and Paul Alexandre, the young doctor who was Modigliani’s first patron, bought it instead. It sold at Sotheby’s New York on 7 May 2013 for $25.9 million.
Links
- Process video — YouTube
- L’Amazone — Wikimedia Commons — PD, the finished painting
- L’Amazone, lot 12 — Sotheby’s — the 7 May 2013 sale (est. $20–30m). The catalogue essay finds “a powerful erotic charge” in a buttoned riding coat and top hat, credits Modigliani’s “devilish good looks and bacchanalian temperament,” and reports the Baroness “apparently did not recognize herself”
- Sale results — $23m hammer, $25,925,000 with premium (Sotheby’s hides the figure behind a login)