Secret Modigliani

Paul Alexandre with band

Oil on canvas — 1911-12?

Date1911-12?
MediumOil on canvas
Size92 × 60 cm
CollectionPrivate Collection?
Signature"modigliani" lower right
Investigation59

paul alexandre by amedeo modigliani



Identification

Title
English: Portrait of Paul Alexandre, Alexandre with band, Bust of Paul Alexandre, Paul Alexandre - Dandy.
Notes: Paul Alexandre (Ceroni, Martigny 1990); Portrait de Paul Alexandre (Sotheby's, Paris, 2014); Dr. Paul Alexandre (Dandy) (Museum of Modern Art, 1951); Portrait of Paul Alexandre, Alexandre with band, Bust of Paul Alexandre, Paul Alexandre - Dandy (Others).
Date
1911-12?
Notes: 1911 (Museum of Modern Art 1951); 1911–12 (Sotheby's 2014; Martigny 1990)
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
92 × 60 cm
Signature
Signed "modigliani" lower right
Present location
Private Collection?

Catalogue numbers

Compiler Number
Arthur Pfannstielno. 25 / 1929 - VII
Joseph Lanthemannno. 39
Ambrogio Ceronino. 31
Jeanne ModiglianiYES
Christian Parisot1/1911
Osvaldo Patanino. 35
Modigliani ProjectYES
MRYES
Modigliani Initiative/ AMDC?

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. Acquired to the artist by the sitter
  2. Alexandre descent
  3. Mme. Jeanne Bréfort
  4. Property from the collection of Paul Alexandre
  5. Sale Sotheby's 04-June-2014 - Paris Art Impressionnist et Moderne
  6. SalePF1406
  7. Estimate:
  8. 5.000.000 - 8.000.000 Euros - Sold: 13.537.500 Euros

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.

Exhibitions

Notes

This painting presents holes in the 4 corners (2 of them covered by restoration)

Where sources disagree, both readings are given. This is a working research page, not a catalogue raisonné.

paul alexandre portrait for auction framed at 2018
Paul Alexandre portrait for auction framed at 2014

Introduction

A man stands facing us, cut off at the hips, with his hands folded one over the other at the waist. He wears a black suit buttoned high, a white collar and a narrow black tie. His hair is brown, short and parted in the middle. His face is a long, pale-pink oval with flat planes. The eyebrows are drawn as two thin arcs that run into the long, straight line of the nose. The eyes are small, pale and slightly unequal. A large, curled moustache in red-brown sits over a small mouth, and a pointed beard closes the face below. Behind him is a field of blue-green, scrubbed and uneven. At the right, a vertical band of red-orange runs from top to bottom, crossed by a dark zigzag pattern of lozenges. Beyond it, at the extreme right edge, is a narrow strip of olive and ochre.
This is the fourth of five painted portraits of Dr Paul Alexandre, Modigliani's first patron. The Tate Papers (no. 35) study of Modigliani's hidden paintings names the five as C13, C14, C15, C31 and C40, and the LaM teaching dossier of 2016 says simply that "Modigliani peindra Paul Alexandre cinq fois en cinq ans". Ceroni catalogued the picture as no. 31, and his note says that it "mostra un nuovo Modigliani": compared with the two portraits of 1909, it shows "a greater incisiveness of drawing with a reduction of painterly matter; and a likeness that is less external, more intimate, truer, closer to the character of the sitter". The painting stayed in the Alexandre family until Sotheby's sold it in Paris on 4 June 2014. The Sotheby's catalogue note calls it "by far the most powerful" of the series and a "pivotal work".
This essay looks at how that change happens on the canvas, and it sets out the problems in the documentation: a wrong Ceroni number on the Secret Modigliani page, conflicting exhibition numbers, and an interesting tension between the condition report and the sitter's own account of Modigliani's method.

Composition and format

The canvas measures 92 by 60 centimetres. That is the French standard size 30 marine (92 × 60), used upright (my identification). The 2018 Burlington Magazine introduction to the Modigliani Technical Research Study found that the artist "turned paysage and marine strainers on their shorter edges" for portraits, with "examples from as early as 1908", and that marine sizes were the most common among the seventy-six paintings it surveyed. This portrait is a large example of that habit. The marine format is tall and narrow (its height is just over one and a half times its width), so it suits a standing half-length figure.
The figure is built on a strong vertical axis. The parting of the hair, the line of the nose, the centre of the moustache, the tie and the line of buttons all fall on one line, slightly to the left of the canvas centre. The body is a dark, almost rectangular block. The shoulders are broad and level, and the sides of the jacket run straight down to the lower edge, where they are cut off. The hands, folded at the bottom of the canvas, close the composition and stop the eye from sliding out of the picture. The head sits high, with only a narrow strip of background above the hair. The Sotheby's note describes the composition as "geometrised" and points to its "frontality, a vertical axis and economy of colour", which it relates to Cézanne. Those terms fit what we see.
The red band at the right is the most unusual element. It is a second vertical, parallel to the figure, and it divides the background into two unequal parts: a broad blue-green zone on the left and a narrow red zone on the right, followed by the olive strip at the very edge. The band has the effect of a pilaster or a hanging. It frames the figure and also flattens the space, because it is painted as flatly as the figure.

Figure and space

There is almost no depth. The figure stands directly in front of the background with no floor, no furniture and no shadow. The only spatial cue is the overlap of the shoulder over the red band at the right. Even this is ambiguous, because the band's pattern is painted as flatly as the figure. The olive strip at the far right could be read as the edge of a wall, a door frame or the end of a textile, but the painting does not say.
The pose is frontal and still. In the 1909 portraits, according to the Sotheby's note, Alexandre "turns three-quarters facing the viewer, his right hand in his pocket or on his hip". Here the hands are folded and the body faces us directly. The figure becomes more like a column or a statue, and the folded hands are the gesture of someone who waits rather than someone who poses. The red band reinforces this architectural reading.

The sitter and the textile

Paul Alexandre, who died in 1968 according to the Sotheby's note, met Modigliani in 1907, when he was completing his internship at the Lariboisière hospital. He was, as the Tate study puts it, Modigliani's "only known buyer until 1914". He was mobilised in August 1914, and the two men never saw each other again. The Sotheby's note reports, on the testimony of Alexandre's daughter, that "this portrait was painted just after the death of the sitter's mother". I have not been able to check this in an independent source, and the date of the mother's death is not given in any source I opened.
The title used by the Museum of Modern Art in 1951, Dr. Paul Alexandre (Dandy), points to the sitter's elegance: the high collar, the narrow tie, the curled moustache. The Sotheby's note observes that these portraits "are in keeping with the photograph of the young doctor dating from 1909 with this suit, white collar and black tie".
The red band is discussed at length by Sotheby's. In 1968, the Brancusi specialist Sidney Geist asked Alexandre's daughter, Mme Bréfort, about it. She replied, according to the Sotheby's note, "that it was highly likely that Modigliani had taken inspiration from a Moroccan or African wall-hanging that was in Paul Alexandre's home at the time", and that although the hanging had not been found, she "remained convinced that it was not invented by the artist". The source for this is Geist's essay "Le devenir de la colonne sans fin" (1998), which I have not consulted. The Sotheby's note goes further and compares the lozenge band to Brancusi's Endless Column, which it dates to about 1916–18. This is an interesting suggestion, but it is the auction house's interpretation, not a documented connection. What we can see is that the band is a stack of lozenges between two vertical lines, rhythmic and slightly irregular, and that it gives the painting a second, non-figurative vertical beside the figure.

Comparisons

The 1909 portraits of Paul Alexandre (C13–C15). Ceroni's note sets this painting against "gli altri due del 1909", the two other portraits of 1909. The Sotheby's note describes the 1909 group: "The first is a study, while the second, painted against a brown background and the last with a green background present the same scene." In those portraits, it says, La Juive (C9) sometimes hangs in the background. Compared with them, this portrait drops the three-quarter turn, the hand on the hip and the domestic details, and it simplifies the face. Ceroni speaks of a "riduzione di materia pittorica" (a reduction of paint matter), and the thinness of the background here bears this out.
Paul Alexandre in Front of a Window (C40), 1913, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen.** This is the fifth and last portrait. According to the Tate study, it was painted "between mid-November 1913 and the beginning of 1914". Ceroni's note on no. 40 says that Modigliani painted it "senza pose", without sittings, and that "E' il primo ritratto che ricorda, per l'allungamento, le teste scolpite dall'artista" ("it is the first portrait that recalls, through elongation, the heads sculpted by the artist"). Sotheby's also says that it was painted from memory. The two portraits are close in palette, and both are tall and narrow. But C40 elongates the face further and adds a window, a curtain and a hidden architectural element, while C31 keeps a single figure against a flat ground and one patterned band. On Ceroni's account, then, C31 stands at the threshold: it has the sculptural line, but not yet the elongation.
The stone heads. The Sotheby's note dates the portrait to the years when Modigliani "focussed almost exclusively on stone sculpture". It mentions the exhibition of sculpted heads in Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso's studio in 1911, documented by a letter from Brancusi to Alexandre dated 4 March 1911. The face of the portrait, with its long nose, flat planes and small mouth, shares these features with the heads, while keeping the beard and moustache that identify the sitter.

Provenance and exhibitions

The provenance is short and well documented. According to Sotheby's, it was acquired from the artist by Dr Paul Alexandre, Paris, and passed "by descent to the present owner". The Secret Modigliani page adds Mme Jeanne Bréfort, the sitter's daughter. The 1990 Martigny list, as published by Secret Modigliani, names "Mme. Jeanne Bréfort" as the owner of no. 17, Paul Alexandre, 1911–1912, oil on canvas. The painting was sold at Sotheby's Paris, Art Impressionniste et Moderne, 4 June 2014, lot 9, with an estimate of €5,000,000–8,000,000. The Sotheby's lot page I opened does not display the result ("Log in to view results"). The figure of €13,537,500 comes from the Secret Modigliani page. A report by Pierrick Moritz on Art Without Skin, published on the day of the sale, gives a rounded price of "13,5 millions d'euros" and describes it as the highest price for a painting by the artist sold in France.
Exhibitions: Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Cleveland Museum of Art, 1950–51, unnumbered, "Lent by Dr. Paul Alexandre, Paris" and not illustrated (the 1951 catalogue lists it without an "Ill." reference); Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, 1990, no. 17; Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Zurich, Kunsthaus, 1991.

Discrepancies

  1. Düsseldorf and Zurich 1991. The Secret Modigliani page gives no. 7; Sotheby's gives no. 11. The Secret Modigliani pages give nos. 8 and 9 to the Nagoya and Düsseldorf caryatids (C34 and C35) in the same exhibition, which would be consistent with no. 7, but I could not check the catalogue.
  2. Date. 1911 (MoMA 1951; Luxembourg 2002 according to Sotheby's) and 1911–12 (Martigny 1990; Sotheby's 2014). There is no inscribed date.

Technical analysis

No technical study of this painting has been published, as far as I could find. Neither the Burlington Magazine introduction of 2018 nor the Tate Papers no. 35 analyses it. The following is based on the Sotheby's condition report, the Secret Modigliani page, and comparative evidence clearly labelled as such.
Condition. The Sotheby's condition report states: "The canvas is not lined and has never been varnished. The colours have remained fresh and the impasto on the figure's face, shoulders and hands is intact." It notes a light horizontal scratch near the lower left corner and a faint diagonal one on the figure's left shoulder "(perhaps inherent to the artist's process)", some frame abrasion at the edges and "no evidence of retouching under UV light". Sotheby's adds the usual caveat that its staff are not professional conservators.
The corner holes. The Secret Modigliani page notes: "This painting presents holes in the 4 corners (2 of them covered by restoration)". This sits uneasily with the Sotheby's statement that there is no visible retouching under UV, although "covered by restoration" might refer to filling rather than retouching. Either way, the observation becomes significant in the light of comparative evidence. Comparative: in C40, the 1913 portrait of the same sitter, the Tate study found "push-pin holes at each corner", with the paint under the pin disturbed, showing that "the pin was pressed in when the paint was still soft". It suggests two explanations: "Photographs of the artist's studio show that he sometimes pinned canvases directly to the wall", or the holes "could also have been made by tacks that Modigliani used as spacers to stack wet paintings against one another". If the holes in C31 are of the same kind, they would point to the same studio practice. Only an examination of the holes would show this.
Varnish. The Sotheby's report that the painting "has never been varnished" contrasts with Paul Alexandre's own account, as quoted by Sotheby's: Modigliani "varnished by very carefully spreading a thin layer of polish. Then he rubbed after drying with a chamois or flannel." Comparative: C40 has "a very thin varnish layer… applied, probably with a brush", 5 to 17 micrometres thick. The difference may be real, may reflect the limits of a visual condition report, or may reflect a change in practice between 1911–12 and 1913. It is a question for future technical study.
Support and ground (comparative only). The 1913 portrait is on "a thin, tightly woven canvas" with a commercial lead-white ground, and its dimensions "do not correspond to any standard format", whereas C31 is on a standard marine 30. The Burlington article reports that the canvases it examined "seem to have been commercially prepared with an oil-based priming", and it mentions a supplier's mark, "A. Moreaux, 106 Bd Montparnasse", found on a caryatid painting of 1913 (C37), near the Cité Falguière, where Modigliani had a studio from 1909 to 1912. Whether C31 carries a supplier's stamp is not documented in any source I opened. The thin paint with the texture of the canvas showing through suggests a smooth commercial ground, but this is only an inference from the reproduction.

Conclusion

This portrait marks a turning point in Modigliani's portraiture. The relaxed three-quarter poses of 1909 give way to a frontal, almost architectural figure. The face is drawn with the line of the stone heads, while the moustache and beard keep it a portrait of a friend. Ceroni saw this as "un nuovo Modigliani" and stressed the gain in drawing and intimacy and the reduction of paint. The red band at the right, said by the sitter's daughter to derive from a Moroccan or African wall-hanging in the doctor's home, adds a non-European pattern to a composition that is otherwise severe.
The painting is also one of the best-documented of the Alexandre works: it never left the family until 2014, it was lent only once in the sitter's lifetime, and its unvarnished, unlined state makes it an important candidate for technical study. The questions raised here — the corner holes, the absence of varnish, the support — could be answered by examination, and the 1913 portrait in Rouen offers an exact point of comparison.

Museum, auction and exhibition sources

  1. Sotheby's, Paris, Art Impressionniste et Moderne, 4 June 2014, sale PF1406, lot 9, Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait de Paul Alexandre (description, provenance, exhibitions, literature, condition report and catalogue note by Vérane Tasseau), https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/art-impressionniste-et-moderne-pf1406/lot.9.html
  2. Pierrick Moritz, "Les Modigliani de Paul Alexandre vendus au plus haut chez Sotheby's à Paris", Art Without Skin, 4 June 2014, https://artwithoutskin.com/2014/06/04/les-modigliani-de-paul-alexandre-vendus-au-plus-haut-chez-sothebys-a-paris/
  3. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art, Modigliani: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, introduction by James Thrall Soby (1951), catalogue of the exhibition, https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2916_300191634.pdf
  4. LaM, Villeneuve-d'Ascq, Amedeo Modigliani: l'œil intérieur, dossier pédagogique (2016), https://www.musee-lam.fr/sites/default/files/2019-01/Dossier-pedago-Modigliani-l-oeil-interieur.pdf

Technical literature (comparative)

  1. Anaïs Genty-Vincent et al., "Works by Modigliani that have Paintings beneath the Visible Surface", Tate Papers, no. 35, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/35/works-by-modigliani-that-have-paintings-beneath-the-visible-surface (section on Paul Alexandre in Front of a Window, C40)
  2. Annette King, Nancy Ireson, Simonetta Fraquelli and Joyce H. Townsend, "The Modigliani Technical Research Study: An introduction to Modigliani's materials and techniques", The Burlington Magazine, vol. 160, no. 1380 (March 2018), pp. 182–88, https://www.burlington.org.uk/archive/article/the-modigliani-technical-research-study-an-introduction-to-modiglianis-materials-and-techniques

Cited but not independently consulted

Pfannstiel, Modigliani, 1929, p. 5, no. VII; Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani, 1954, pl. 4; Roy, Modigliani, 1958, p. 33, and 1985, p. 33; Ceroni, Amedeo Modigliani peintre, 1958, no. 23; Lanthemann, 1970, no. 39; Ceroni and Piccioni, 1970, no. 31; Ceroni and Cachin, Tout l'œuvre peint de Modigliani, 1972, no. 15; Castieau-Barrielle, 1987, p. 54; Schmalenbach, 1990, p. 59, no. 11; Parisot, 1991, no. 1/1911; Patani, 1991, no. 35; Rubin (ed.), "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art, 1984, vol. 2, p. 356; Noël Alexandre, Modigliani inconnu, 1993, no. 331, p. 69; Kruszynski, Amedeo Modigliani: Portraits and Nudes, 1996, p. 11; Modigliani: l'ange au visage grave, Musée du Luxembourg, 2002, no. 28, p. 27; Sidney Geist, "Le devenir de la colonne sans fin", Les carnets de l'Atelier Brancusi, 1998, p. 16; Amedeo Modigliani, Peintures du don Philippe et Blaise Alexandre, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, 2002; Düsseldorf and Zurich exhibition catalogue, 1991.

Footnotes

  1. Arthur Pfannstiel, Modigliani. L’Art et la Vie, preface by Louis Latourette, Paris, Seheur, 1929 (presumed catalogue).
  2. Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani, 1884–1920, New York, 1954.
  3. Arthur Pfannstiel, Modigliani et son œuvre, étude critique et catalogue raisonné, Paris, Bibliothèque des Arts, 1956.
  4. Claude Roy, Modigliani, Lausanne / Paris, Skira / Nathan, 1958–85.
  5. Ambrogio Ceroni, Amedeo Modigliani: Peintre; suivi des souvenirs de Lunia Czechowska, Milan, Edizioni del Milione, 1958.
  6. Joseph Lanthemann, Modigliani, catalogue raisonné: sa vie, son œuvre, son art, Barcelona, G. Condal, 1970.
  7. Ambrogio Ceroni and Leone Piccioni, I dipinti di Modigliani, Milan, Rizzoli, 1970.
  8. Werner Schmalenbach, Amedeo Modigliani, Munich, Prestel, 1990.
  9. Osvaldo Patani, Amedeo Modigliani: catalogo generale, Milan, Leonardo, 1991–94.
  10. Christian Parisot, Catalogue raisonné Modigliani, Livorno, Graphis Arte, 1991.
  11. Noël Alexandre, Modigliani inconnu: témoignages, documents et dessins inédits de l’ancienne collection de Paul Alexandre, Paris, 1993.
  12. MR (cited here as MR), Modigliani: l’ange au visage grave, Paris, Musée du Luxembourg, 2002. Cited from the published exhibition catalogue only.
  13. MR (cited here as MR), Le silence éternel, Paris, Pinacothèque de Paris, 2008. Cited from the published exhibition catalogue only.
  14. Victoria Soto Caba, Modigliani: The Timeless Face, Madrid, Libsa, 2007.