Seated Young Man (Centre Pompidou)

Identification

Published titles

English: Seated Young Man (Centre Pompidou); Portrait of a Boy; Young Red Boy; Boy in a Green Suit; Seated Young Man.

Date

The museum dates the work 1 January 1919, a conventional day and month assigned to the year. Catalogues usually give 1918 or 1919. The reverse of the canvas is reported to read “Nice 1919”.

Medium

Oil on canvas.

Dimensions

Museum: 92 × 55 cm. Other sources: 92.5 × 54.8 cm. Ceroni printed 92 × 60 cm in error.

Signature

Signed modigliani at top right, in black oil. The source compiler describes doubled strokes as a dry bristle, not a second signature, and rejects MR’s claim that certain letter-forms never occur in authentic signatures.

Present location

Centre Pompidou — Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, inv. AM1994-424. Donation 1979, effective 1994.

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. Not documented before Léopold Zborowski, Paris.
2. Dutilleul Collection, Paris.
3. Masurel Collection, Paris.
4. Centre Pompidou, Paris, inv. AM1994-424.

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.

• Jean Cocteau, Modigliani, Paris, Hazan, 1950, pl. 4.¹
• Arthur Pfannstiel, 1956, no. 306, as young red-haired man with gay jacket.
• Jeanne Modigliani, Modigliani sans légende, Paris, Gründ, 1961, pl. 8.²
• Joseph Lanthemann, 1970, no. 379.
• Ambrogio Ceroni, Rizzoli 1970 and French 1972, no. 300.
• Osvaldo Patani, 1991–94, no. 311.
• Kenneth Wayne, Modigliani and the Artists of Montparnasse, New York, Abrams, 2002, p. 117, no. 40.³
• Simonetta Fraquelli, review in The Burlington Magazine 145 (2003), pp. 254–255.

Exhibitions

• Paris, Galerie de France, 1945–46, no. 14.
• Paris, Galerie Charpentier, L’enfance, 1949.
• Frankfurt, Steinernes Haus, 1963, no. 28.
• Tokyo, Musée Idemitsu, André Malraux et le Japon éternel, 1978, no. 635.
• Paris, Musée du Luxembourg, donation Masurel, 1980, no. 94.
• Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1981, no. 81.
• Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Musée Matisse, 1998.
• Buffalo, Albright-Knox, and Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, 2002–2003, no. 40.
• Japanese tour of the Lille Métropole collection, 2006–2007.
• Saint-Tropez, L’Annonciade, 2010.
• Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, 2013, no. 22.
• Pisa, BLU Palazzo, 2014–2015; Turin, GAM, 2015.
• Villeneuve-d’Ascq, LaM, 2016; Budapest, 2016; Helsinki, 2016–2017.

Notes

Not listed in the D’Atri papers.

This investigation relates this seated figure to a smaller bust of the same boy.

Image courtesy of Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, as credited in this investigation.

The original page of this investigation marked several fields as still being checked. The facts above are those already published; where the sources disagree, both readings are given.