Secret Modigliani

Standing nude with crossed arms - Nu debout - Cariatide - Caryatide

Oil on cardboard? — 1911-12?

Date1911-12?
MediumOil on cardboard?
Size82,8 × 47.9 cm
CollectionNagoya Art Museum, Japan
SignatureModigliani - lower right
Investigation60

standing nude arms crossed by amedeo modigliani
Identification

Title
English: Standing nude with crossed arms.
French: Nu debout - Cariatide - Caryatide.
Italian: Nudo in piedi, a braccia conserte.
Notes: Nudo in piedi, a braccia conserte (Ceroni); Standing Nude (Study for a Caryatid) / Nu debout (Etude pour une Caryatid) (Nagoya City Art Museum database); Standing Nude with Crossed Arms (Tate Papers, no. 35); Standing nude with crossed arms - Nu debout - Cariatide - Caryatide (Others).
Date
1911-12?
Notes: c. 1911–12 (Nagoya City Art Museum; Tate Papers); 1911 (Lanthemann)
Medium
Oil on cardboard?
Notes: oil on cardboard glued to canvas (MR); oil on cardboard glued to wood (Patani); Oil and watercolour on paper, on board (Nagoya City Art Museum: 油彩，水彩・紙，板); oil on paper (Ceroni).
Dimensions
82,8 × 47.9 cm?
Notes: 83.0 × 47.8 cm (Nagoya City Art Museum); 82.8 × 47.9 cm (Others); 83 × 48 cm (Ceroni)
Signature
Signed Modigliani - lower right
Present location
Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya, Japan, no. 1986.02.116.001.

Catalogue numbers

Compiler Number
Arthur Pfannstielno. 18-Bis
Joseph Lanthemannno. 470
Ambrogio Ceronino. 34
Jeanne Modigliani—
Christian Parisot4/1911
Osvaldo Patanino. 38
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. Paul Alexandre Coll. Paris
  2. Gallery Berggruen Paris
  3. Perls Galleries, New York (1963-1981?)
  4. Private collection Japan
  5. Nagoya city art museum, Japan (1986)

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

Museum record (verified): Nagoya City Art Museum. Oil on cardboard (or paper mounted on board), 82.8 × 47.9 cm, c. 1911–12. Title: Standing Nude with Crossed Arms / Study for Caryatid.

No further documentary note is recorded in this investigation beyond the fields above. Where sources disagree, both readings are given.

Introduction

A pale, almost colourless woman stands upright on a cream-coloured sheet. Her arms are folded under her breasts. Her face is a long oval with heavy-lidded almond eyes, a long, thin nose and a small mouth, under a cap of hair drawn in rows of short, wavy strokes. Her breasts are two circles, each ringed with a crown of dark dots. Below the folded arms, a line of small scallops crosses the body like a girdle. Her legs are pressed together and divided by a single dark line, and her knees are drawn as two spirals. She stands on a flat oval plinth, drawn in a thin grey line, and a curling line runs from the plinth towards the lower right corner. Around her, from the head to the knees, a cloud of dark violet-blue rises like a shadow or an aura, with streaks of brown and black along her right side and at her feet. The rest of the sheet is bare. At the lower right, in small dark letters, is the signature "modigliani".
Ceroni catalogued this work as no. 34, with the same title as no. 33, Nudo in piedi, a braccia conserte, and located it in a U.S. private collection. Today it belongs to the Nagoya City Art Museum, whose database titles it Standing Nude (Study for a Caryatid) and dates it to about 1911–12. It is one of the best-travelled of Modigliani's caryatid paintings: the Secret Modigliani page on the work lists many exhibitions.

Facture

The paint layer is thin. Where the white of the figure is applied, it is laid in short, dry strokes that leave the ground visible. The violet-blue is brushed more broadly and heavily. The lines are drawn over the paint with a fine brush or, possibly, a crayon, and in places they seem to sit on top of the colour rather than under it.
The museum database describes the medium as oil and watercolour on paper and board. That would account for the contrast between the opaque, dry passages and the thin, transparent ones, although the reproduction alone cannot confirm which areas are oil and which are watercolour. The overall handling is rapid and sketch-like, and it supports the museum's title, Study for a Caryatid.

Figure and space

The space is created only by the aura and the plinth. The aura reads as a dark niche, a shadow on a wall or a halo, and the plinth places the figure on a horizontal surface. Beyond these, the bare sheet is not a space but a ground.
The figure is still and closed. The folded arms, the pressed legs and the lowered eyes give it an inward, self-contained quality, as in C33. But the pale colour and the small scale of the figure in relation to the sheet make it lighter and more remote. It is less a monument than an image of a monument.

Iconography and models

The museum's title, Study for a Caryatid, places the work within the caryatid project. The Jewish Museum's text describes that project: "In 1911 Modigliani began to explore another motif borrowed from ancient art: the Greek figure of the caryatid. He produced innumerable drawings and paintings of standing or kneeling statuesque figures upholding an unseen architectural weight." It adds that some are "rigorously hieratic". The Nagoya figure, with its frontality, folded arms and plinth, is one of the most hieratic.
The Tate Papers study of the nudes groups C32–39 as "nude caryatid-like figures inspired by Egyptian, Greek and Cambodian art". In this figure, the Egyptian element is the stance, with the legs pressed together and the arms folded. The Greek element is the type of the caryatid itself. The ornament may come from South or Southeast Asian sculpture. The Sotheby's 2014 catalogue note on C31 says that Modigliani discovered Khmer and Indian art "at the Musée Guimet with Brancusi and Souza-Cardoso". The dotted circles around the breasts recall jewellery or tattooing on such figures, but the sources do not identify a specific model.

Comparisons

Standing Nude with Arms Crossed (C33), private collection. This is the closest comparison and the source of a confusing shared title. The pose is the same: the forearms are folded under circular breasts, the legs are pressed together and the eyes lowered. But C33 is larger (about 122 × 41 cm), painted in saturated coral against ultramarine, and fills its board. C34 is pale, drawn and set into a wide margin of bare ground. C33 has smooth hair and circles at the knees. C34 has wavy, segmented hair and spiral knees.
Standing Nude with Arms Half Extended (C32), private collection. C32 shares the wavy, piled-up hair of C34 and the drawn lines on a partly bare lower zone, but its arms are open and its colours saturated.
Caryatid (C35), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. The Düsseldorf caryatid kneels and raises its arms to support a load. It is painted in warm reds and browns on canvas. It shows the full architectural function that the standing caryatids only suggest.
Caryatid (C36), Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya. The Tate Papers list names a second painted caryatid in Nagoya, in a different museum: Caryatid 1911–13, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art (C36). The Sotheby's 2005 catalogue note on C32–C33 also reproduces it as its fig. 2. The two Nagoya caryatids are easy to confuse. One of the exhibitions listed for C34 on the Secret Modigliani page, "Nagoya, Modigliani exhibition, Aichi Prefectural Art Gallery, 1985", adds to the risk. I have not opened the Aichi museum's page on C36.
Drawings. The Jewish Museum's 2017–18 checklist lists caryatid drawings of c. 1911, including Female Caryatid Seated on a Plinth with Lighted Candles and Female Caryatid Kneeling on a Plinth with Three Lighted Candles. The first is lent from a private collection and the second by the Paul Alexandre family. Both show caryatids on plinths, as in C34. The plinth seems to have been part of how Modigliani imagined these figures: as sculptures to be set up, not as models in a studio.

Provenance and exhibitions

Provenance: Paul Alexandre, Paris; Galerie Berggruen, Paris; Perls Galleries, New York (1963–1981?); private collection, Japan; Nagoya City Art Museum, Japan (2018). The page marks the provenance "In process". Ceroni's location in 1970, "U.S.A., proprietà privata", fits a period with Perls Galleries or a U.S. owner.
The exhibition history is long: Frankfurt, Steinernes Haus, 1963, no. 5; New York, Perls Galleries, 1963, no. 2, and The Nudes of Modigliani, 1966, no. 13; Tokyo and Osaka, Daimaru, 1979, no. 1; Liège, Musée Saint-Georges, 1980, no. 3; Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1981, no. 7; Livorno, Villa Maria, 1984, no. 15; Verona and Turin, Incontri italiani, 1984–85, no. 16; Tokyo, National Museum, 1985, no. 25; Nagoya, Aichi Prefectural Art Gallery, 1985; Ibaraki, Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, 1988, no. 1; Düsseldorf and Zurich, 1991, no. 8; Lugano, Museo d'Arte Moderna, 1999, no. 7; Buffalo, Fort Worth and Los Angeles, Modigliani and the Artists of Montparnasse, 2002–03, no. 1; New York, Toronto and Washington, Modigliani: Beyond the Myth, 2004–05. I have not been able to check any of these catalogues, for Modigliani Unmasked checklist, and I do not claim that it was shown there.

Discrepancies

  1. Medium. This is the main problem. The museum database gives oil and watercolour on paper, on board (油彩，水彩・紙，板). The Secret Modigliani page gives oil on cardboard, and in its notes "Oil on cardboard (or paper mounted on board)" as the museum's description. Restellini gives cardboard glued to canvas, Patani cardboard glued to wood, and Ceroni oil on paper. The museum's current database mentions watercolour, which none of the other sources do.
  2. Dimensions. 83.0 × 47.8 cm (museum database) versus 82.8 × 47.9 cm (Others) versus 83 × 48 cm (Ceroni). The differences are small but should be noted.

Technical analysis

No technical study of this painting has been published, as far as I could find. It is not among the works examined in the Burlington Magazine introduction of 2018 or the Tate Papers no. 35. The Secret Modigliani page cites Simonetta Fraquelli's review "Modigliani, Fort Worth and Paris" in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 145 (2003), pp. 254–55, which I have not seen. It is an exhibition review and probably not a technical study.
Support and medium. The disagreement over the medium is itself the main technical question. The museum's database mentions paper and board, and oil and watercolour. Other sources speak of cardboard, glued to canvas or to wood. These descriptions could be reconciled if the work is a sheet of paper or thin card laid down on a rigid board at some point, perhaps after it left the artist's hands. Only an examination of the edges and back could show this.
Comparative: the Tate Papers study of hidden paintings notes that "During the early years of his career, Modigliani painted on various kinds of support, from cardboard to canvas", and that his choice was "largely influenced by his precarious financial situation". The same paper notes "a similarly open-minded approach to finding two-dimensional supports" to his approach to sculpture materials. The study of the nudes found that plain-weave canvas "appears to have been the artist's exclusive choice of support after 1916". The paper-and-board support of C34 thus belongs to the experimental years.
Mixed media. If the museum's "oil and watercolour" is correct, this would be unusual among Ceroni's paintings. It would fit the work's character as a drawn study, close to the gouaches and watercolours of caryatids. One of these, Cariatide rose avec un bord bleu, c. 1912, a watercolour lent by Perls Galleries, appears in the Martigny 1990 list published by Secret Modigliani. Analysis could tell whether the pale passages are watercolour with white, gouache or thin oil.
Pigments (comparative only). The violet-blue may be ultramarine, cobalt or a mixture with red. Comparative: the Tate study of C40 (1913) found cobalt blue in its highlights. Without analysis, the pigments of C34 cannot be identified.

Conclusion

The Nagoya Standing Nude with Crossed Arms is the most graphic of the standing caryatid paintings. It shows the same hieratic pose as the coral panel C33, but in a pale figure set on a plinth against a bare sheet, surrounded by a violet aura and decorated with rings of dots and a scalloped girdle. The museum's title, Study for a Caryatid, describes it well: it is a study of a statue rather than of a woman, and it imagines the figure on its base.
Its documentation, though long, needs correcting on several points: the medium, which the museum now describes as oil and watercolour on paper and board; the date of acquisition, which the accession number suggests may be 1986 rather than 2018; and the identical Ceroni title it shares with no. 33. A technical examination of the support and the paint layers would settle the first point, and the museum's files the second.

Museum, auction and exhibition sources

  1. Nagoya City Art Museum, collection database, Standing Nude (Study for a Caryatid) / 立てる裸婦(カリアティードのための習作), no. 1986.02.116.001, https://jmapps.ne.jp/ncam/det.html?data_id=263
  2. The Jewish Museum, New York, Modigliani Unmasked, large-print exhibition guide, https://thejewishmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Modigliani_Large_Print_FINAL.pdf
  3. The Jewish Museum, New York, Modigliani Unmasked (2017–18), checklist, https://thejewishmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Modigliani_Unmasked_checklist.pdf
  4. Sotheby's, German and Austrian Art, Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale and Surrealist Art, 2005, sale L05002, lot 38 (catalogue note, fig. 2), https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2005/german-and-austrian-art-impressionist-and-modern-art-evening-sale-and-surrealist-art-l05002/lot.38.html
  5. Sotheby's, Paris, Art Impressionniste et Moderne, 4 June 2014, sale PF1406, lot 9, Portrait de Paul Alexandre (catalogue note on Modigliani's sources), https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/art-impressionniste-et-moderne-pf1406/lot.9.html

Technical literature (comparative)

  1. Barbara Buckley et al., "Modigliani's Painted Nudes: A Technical Study", Tate Papers, no. 35, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/35/modiglianis-painted-nudes-technical-study
  2. 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
  3. 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

Sources that could not be opened

The Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art page on C36 was not opened. The Nagoya City Art Museum database does not give an acquisition date or provenance. No exhibition catalogue listed above could be consulted.

Cited but not independently consulted

Pfannstiel, Modigliani, 1929, p. 5, and Modigliani et son œuvre, 1956, no. 18 bis; Ceroni, Amedeo Modigliani peintre, 1958, no. 26; Werner, Amedeo Modigliani, 1967, no. 20, and 1968 and 1985, p. 22; Diehl, Modigliani, 1969, p. 41, and 1989, p. 27; Lanthemann, 1970, no. 470; Ceroni and Piccioni, 1970, no. 34; Hall, Modigliani, 1979, pl. 2; Mann, Modigliani, 1980, pl. 74; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1981, p. 105; Patani, 1984 and 1991, no. 38; Roy, 1985, p. 62; Castieau-Barrielle, 1987, p. 67; Schmalenbach, 1990, p. 65; Parisot, 1991, no. 4/1911; Chiappini (ed.), Amedeo Modigliani, Lugano, 1999; Krystof, Amedeo Modigliani: The Poetry of Seeing, 2000, pp. 24–25; Wayne, Modigliani and the Artists of Montparnasse, 2002, p. 78; Fraquelli, "Modigliani, Fort Worth and Paris", The Burlington Magazine, 145 (2003), pp. 254–55; Klein, Modigliani: Beyond the Myth, 2004, p. 208; Soto Caba, 2007; MR (cited for the medium).

Footnotes

  1. Arthur Pfannstiel, Modigliani. L’Art et la Vie, preface by Louis Latourette, Paris, Seheur, 1929 (presumed catalogue).
  2. Arthur Pfannstiel, Modigliani et son œuvre, étude critique et catalogue raisonné, Paris, Bibliothèque des Arts, 1956.
  3. Ambrogio Ceroni, Amedeo Modigliani: Peintre; suivi des souvenirs de Lunia Czechowska, Milan, Edizioni del Milione, 1958.
  4. Alfred Werner, Amedeo Modigliani, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1966–85.
  5. Gaston Diehl, Modigliani, Paris, Flammarion, 1969.
  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. Carol Mann, Modigliani, London, Thames and Hudson, 1980.
  9. Osvaldo Patani, Amedeo Modigliani: catalogo generale, Milan, Leonardo, 1991–94.
  10. Claude Roy, Modigliani, Lausanne / Paris, Skira / Nathan, 1958–85.
  11. Werner Schmalenbach, Amedeo Modigliani, Munich, Prestel, 1990.
  12. Christian Parisot, Catalogue raisonné Modigliani, Livorno, Graphis Arte, 1991.
  13. Doris Krystof, Amedeo Modigliani: The Poetry of Seeing, Cologne, Taschen, 2000.
  14. Kenneth Wayne, Modigliani and the Artists of Montparnasse, New York, Abrams / Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2002.
  15. Mason Klein, Modigliani: Beyond the Myth, New York, The Jewish Museum / Yale University Press, 2004.
  16. Victoria Soto Caba, Modigliani: The Timeless Face, Madrid, Libsa, 2007.