Left: my tracing, Thursday 10 September. Right: Amedeo Modigliani, Ritratto di giovane donna (Portrait of a Young Woman), 1918 — oil on canvas, 45.7 × 27.9 cm, Yale University Art Gallery (1948.123, Bequest of Kate L. Brewster). Public domain.
The tracing · Auction · Background
1918 Modigliani — a profile, which is interesting, because I’ve seen a lot more straight-on pieces, and a lot here is hair. The eye I especially like — the duct, and he put in the pupil, which he often doesn’t do. Very small mouth. There’s a very good sense of the form in 3D, the geometry around the chin and the cheek — I think that’s a really good thing.
Her shoulder sharply bounds the hair; a further clump of hair has a more complicated depiction against the far shoulder. This is, I guess, the hair tie or something like that. Separately — the background blends with the back of the head.
He adds a certain amount of texture to the waves of the hair, but it becomes very mixed and blended, not so discreet, and then there are some much clearer lights at certain points, which I’m sure are there to add that cross-contour, additional form. There are little circles of some kind here, as if there’s a sort of decorative something in the hair — perhaps, or perhaps something else. They’re also around the top edge of the face, ever so slightly. I think these are just kind of circular, inbound strokes, but they could potentially be something else, down at the bottom of the hair by the neck. Then there’s this large, split mass in the middle of the hair — just remove that, unless it looks like he meant it that way. And then some more of these contour-type lines at the back of the head, also disappearing into that mass.
His depiction of her face has more form than I have — this curving point at the edge of the forehead, the curve from the bridge of the nose to the cheek, and even above the chin, certain curves forming the surfaces. And then of course the pupils. So right now I’ve got the orientation, at least, and some of the dimensionality of the head, but I don’t see an obvious way to put in those more planar surfaces — what would be a line that could carry that? The question is germane to Modigliani, I think, because he does do that kind of thing, but his lines are — he has one at the end of the nostril, but a lot of this has lines that were then colored in.
The other thing I really like is right around the corner of the eye, near the duct — that outbound joint of the two surfaces, the nose versus the area under the eye. I think that’s perhaps worth putting in, because it gives a little more. So I put it in — but now I get a different thing entirely, his was far more subtle. This is going to require more offsetting, crudity, to balance off my effect, which I hadn’t anticipated. This is similar to the problem I had with the recent piece where I thought it looked a bit like Tönnis. I can’t say the eye is in balance now; I feel like I’ve done something that’s unbalanced our sense of the meaning of the lines.
So there’s that one — but what corresponds is this one, proceeding down the face. Maybe that’s where I’ll call it.
What’s happening is a more complex intersection of two surfaces than the line alone would suggest, given what the other lines mean. Right now, the front of the forehead, the ridge of the nose — these are silhouette lines, and their meaning is at the level of the basic form and its boundary. Versus this: an interior conjunction of two surfaces that are sort of planar, not at the level of the boundary, or of a cross-contour. Geometrically, angularly, the angle is more rapidly changing there than across the top of the head. Regardless, my line’s meaning becomes unclear, and to make it have meaning I’d need more lines, which I don’t think I wanted.
In the end, though, mine has far more than just silhouette and cross-contours — more than I wanted. I’ve gone past the simplicity I was after, past what Modigliani was probably working from himself.
Auction. Modigliani’s portraits of Jeanne Hébuterne rarely come to market, and when they do they are headline lots. Jeanne Hébuterne (au chapeau), 1919, sold at Christie’s London in February 2013 for £26.9 million ($42.1 million), against an estimate of £16–22 million. Jeanne Hébuterne (au foulard), c. 1919 — offered at Sotheby’s London in June 2016 after roughly thirty years off the market — made £38.5 million (about $56.6 million). For scale, the auction record for Modigliani overall is $170.4 million, paid at Christie’s New York in 2015 for Nu couché, a reclining nude from the same decade — the second-highest price ever recorded for an artwork at auction at the time.
Background. Yale curator Frauke V. Josenhans identifies the sitter as Jeanne Hébuterne, Modigliani’s companion and herself an art student at the Académie Colarossi — and reads the painting as much as “an ideal woman” as a literal likeness. This exact canvas, Yale 1948.123, is one of just eleven small bust-length portraits (of twenty-six known Hébuterne portraits in total) that Modigliani painted in the South of France between April 1918 and early summer 1919, after he and Hébuterne left Paris for Nice — where their daughter was born that November — and later Cagnes-sur-Mer.
The painting has been examined firsthand in a technical and material study published in Tate Papers (no. 35, 2022–3, nine authors including Josenhans), which used X-radiography and infrared imaging to look under the paint. Its support is an adapted wooden strainer — a narrow wooden strip added to one side to fit the canvas’s nonstandard size, likely put together at the direction of Modigliani’s dealer, Léopold Zborowski, who by then was keeping him supplied with materials. Under infrared, the study finds Modigliani drew the head first in charcoal, then graphite — and revised the angle of the profile partway through, smudging the earlier lines into shadow below the chin and around the eyes and hairline.
In a letter from Nice in early 1919, Modigliani told Zborowski: “I am waiting until a little head that I made of my wife is dry before sending you — with the ones you know about — four canvases.” The study doesn’t identify that particular “little head” with this canvas — it’s one of several small portraits from the same run — but it’s the same kind of painting, made the same way, in the same few months.
Links
- Portrait of a Young Woman — Yale University Art Gallery — the painting traced here (1948.123 / Ceroni C224), 1918, oil on canvas, public domain
- Modigliani’s Portraits of Jeanne Hébuterne 1918–19: A Selected Technical and Material Study — Tate Papers no. 35 — the technical study examining this painting, including the infrared finding on the revised profile
- Wikimedia Commons file used for the master image
- Jeanne Hébuterne (au foulard) — Sotheby’s lot page — 2016 sale, medium and dimensions
- Process video — Thursday 10 September — YouTube
