Secret Modigliani

Caryatid

Oil on cardboard? — 1911-13 ?

Date1911-13 ?
MediumOil on cardboard?
Size87.5 × 67 cm?
CollectionAichi prefectural Museum of Art, Japan
SignatureUnsigned
Investigation65

caryatid- coffee bean by amedeo modigliani

Identification

Title
English: Caryatid.
Notes: Cariatide in piedi (Ceroni); Caryatid / カリアティード (Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art); Caryatid (Tate Papers ).
Date
1911-13 ? (1958 Exhibition say 1910)
Notes: 1911–13 (Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art; Tate Papers); 1913 ( Ceroni); 1912 (Carrieri 1947); 1910 (Milan 1958 exhibition)
Medium
Oil on cardboard (Ceroni , Patani, Parisot, Wayne, : oil on canvas - MR as oil on canvas marouflé on wood)
Oil on canvas supported by panel (油彩、画布・板; Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art); oil on cardboard? (others); oil on canvas (Ceroni, Patani, Parisot, Wayne); oil on canvas marouflé on wood (MR, according, Publication 2002)
Dimensions
87.5 × 67 cm?
Notes: 80.5 × 45.0 cm (Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art); 87.5 × 67 cm (Others); 87.6 × 67 cm (Ceroni 1958); 81 × 46 cm (Ceroni 1970, MR 2002); 82 × 46 cm (Pfannstiel)
Signature
Unsigned
Present location
Aichi prefectural Museum of Art, Japan (Inv. no. FO199600002000)

Catalogue numbers

Compiler Number
Arthur Pfannstielno. 27
Joseph Lanthemannno. 528
Ambrogio Ceronino. 36
Jeanne ModiglianiYES
Christian Parisot1/1913
Osvaldo Patanino. 41
Modigliani ProjectYES
MRYES
Modigliani Initiative?

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 Guillaume Coll. Paris
  2. Sale: Hotel Drouot Paris - 3/march/1927
  3. Poyet Collection
  4. Percier Gallery, Paris
  5. Galleria del Milione Collection, Milano
  6. Antonio Verdirame Collection, Milano
  7. Private Collection, Tokyo
  8. Sale: Christie's, London, 28.3.1988
  9. Bridgestone Museum of art, Japan
  10. Aichi prefectural art museum, Japan ( Inv. no. FO199600002000 )

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): Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya (inv. FO199600002000). Oil on canvas, c. 82 × 46 cm, 1911–13. Title: Caryatid.

in Lanthemann, Modigliani, catalogue raisonné: sa vie, son oeuvre, son art, G. Condal, Barcelona, 1970 under the no. 527 there is an almost identical work

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

Introduction

A naked woman stands with both arms raised above her head, elbows bent outwards, as if she were holding up an invisible beam. She is painted in a hot orange-red, modelled with paler pink and cream, and set against a tall black panel that runs the whole height of the picture. On either side of the black panel is a vertical band of streaked orange-red and brown. Her head is tilted to her right (our left). Her eyes are long almonds under arched brows, with the lids lowered. Her nose is long and straight, and her small mouth is red. A line of dots marks a necklace at the base of the neck, and another line of dots runs round the hips as a girdle. A third line of dots crowns the head at the hairline. The breasts are round and outlined in dark paint. The legs are slightly apart and the knees are close together, so that the lower body narrows to the bottom edge. The feet are cut off by the frame.
Ceroni catalogued the painting as no. 36, Cariatide in piedi ("standing caryatid"), dated 1913 and located in a private collection in Tokyo. It is now in the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art in Nagoya, which dates it 1911–13. The museum's English summary describes the figure as "set in a pose to support the tall picture format, with both hands raised". It also notes that "the imbalance between left and right legs and arms shapes the body into a slightly S-curve form, giving a sense of a moving caryatid". The Secret Modigliani page on the work gathers a long provenance and exhibition history. It also gives dimensions and a medium that differ sharply from the museum's. That is the main problem this essay addresses.

Composition and format

The museum gives the dimensions as 80.5 by 45.0 centimetres. The image is about 1.8 times as high as it is wide. The figure fills this height from the raised hands at the top to the knees and calves at the bottom. The black panel behind her is a little narrower than the picture. It frames the figure as a niche, and the orange-red bands on either side read as the walls or pilasters of the niche. The museum's summary describes them as "bands of brown to the left and right" that "are uneven and seem like a stone wall surface", and says that their uneven size "gives a sense of movement to the composition". In the reproduction on the Secret Modigliani page, the band on the right is wider than the band on the left.
The figure is built on a vertical axis, but it is not symmetrical. The head is tilted to one side, and the left arm (on our right) is raised a little higher than the right. The torso sways slightly. The hips are broad and the legs taper towards the bottom. The Aichi summary speaks of a "slightly S-curve form". I would describe it rather as a long, gentle curve that runs from the tilted head through the torso to the knees.
The proportions of the canvas are unusual. The museum's 80.5 × 45 cm is close to the dimensions of C37 (80 × 45.8 cm, according to Christie's 2017) and C40 (81 × 45.6 cm, according to the Tate Papers). The Tate Papers say that the C40 dimensions "do not correspond to any standard format". The height, 81 cm, corresponds to the no. 25 format, but the width does not match any standard no. 25. That three paintings of 1911–14 share this unusual size is my own observation. It suggests that they may have been cut from larger standard canvases in the same way. The Tate Papers show that C40 was cut from a larger canvas, but no study has examined C36.

Line

The contours of the figure are drawn in dark lines, sometimes black, sometimes dark brown. They are not continuous: in places they are thick and emphatic (under the breasts, along the outer thighs), in others thin or broken. The lines of dots are a characteristic feature of the caryatid paintings and drawings. They appear as a necklace, a girdle and a crown. The face is drawn with a few lines: the arcs of the brows, the almond eyes, the long nose and the small mouth.
There are scratched lines in the black ground beside the figure, which look as if they were made with the end of the brush or a sharp tool while the paint was wet. These are visible in the reproduction on the Secret Modigliani page as fine pale lines in the black, especially on the left.

Colour

The colour scheme is limited: orange-red, black, cream and brown. The figure is orange-red, with cream and pale pink highlights on the breasts, the stomach, the thighs and the face. The black panel behind her is streaked with brown and ochre, and with the pale scratched lines. The orange-red bands at the sides repeat the colour of the figure, so that the figure seems to be made of the same material as the wall behind her. This effect is unusual in Modigliani's caryatids. In C37 the side bands are bare cream canvas, and in C38 the figure is set against a dark ground with a blue aura. There is a touch of blue at the top left, where the hand meets the upper edge.

Facture

The paint is applied in short, broken strokes that leave the ground visible in places. The orange-red bands at the sides are painted with vertical strokes, dragged over a lighter ground. The figure is painted more thickly, with directional strokes that follow the forms. The black panel is scrubbed and scratched. In the reproduction, the surface looks dry and matt, and in places the paint seems to have been rubbed off. Whether this is due to the support (canvas laid on a panel, according to the museum) or to the condition of the painting cannot be told from a reproduction.

Figure and space

The space is shallow and architectural: a niche, with the figure standing in it. The black panel behind her is a flat plane, and the side bands are flat walls. The figure is the only volume in the painting. The museum's summary says that "the sense of muscular mass in the legs and arms exude a strong sense of life force". The modelling with highlights gives her body a rounded, sculptural presence. Here, unlike in C35, there is no painted slab, but the raised arms imply a weight.

Iconography and models

The Aichi summary sets the painting in the context of Modigliani's sculpture: "From 1909-14, until physical strength and economic reasons stopped Modigliani's artistic work, he was extremely interested as a sculptor in the caryatid form". In the Japanese text, what Modigliani gave up for physical and economic reasons is clearly sculpture, not "artistic work" as the English version suggests (my reading of the Japanese: 彫刻に打ち込んだ … 制作を断念するまで). The summary continues: "While only a few of his sculptures (stone sculptures) and oil paintings depict caryatids per se, he left a large number of drawings on the subject." It describes the figure as "somehow simple and primitive" and refers to "the current fashion for primitive sculpture".
The Jewish Museum's exhibition text of 2017–18 notes that Modigliani's caryatids are "oriented either frontally or in profile, and some are posed according to the classical conventions: kneeling in three-quarter view, standing in contrapposto, or rigorously hieratic". The Aichi caryatid is frontal and hieratic, but the tilted head and the uneven arms give her a slight movement. The lines of dots recall the jewellery of ancient Indian and South-East Asian sculpture. The Jewish Museum text says that Modigliani added to his caryatids "elements derived from ancient South and Southeast Asian sources: facial features, postures, tattoos, and other ornamental details". The Christie's 2017 essay on C37 says that the thin patterned belt round that figure's hips "appears almost like a mysterious tattoo". The dotted girdle here can be read in the same way.

Comparisons


*C37, Standing caryatid, 1913, private collection. The closest comparison is C37, sold at Christie's in London in 2017. It has the same pose (arms raised, elbows out, legs together), the same black panel behind the figure and almost the same dimensions. But the differences are telling. In C37 the side bands are bare canvas with streaks of blue and red, and the figure is cooler and smoother, with a patterned girdle and a hairstyle of wavy lines. In C36 the side bands are painted orange-red, the figure is hotter, the head is tilted and the facture is rougher. C36 looks like a more expressive version of the same idea
Lanthemann no. 527. The Secret Modigliani page says that Lanthemann's 1970 catalogue has "under the no. 527 there is an almost identical work". I have not seen Lanthemann's catalogue and cannot say whether no. 527 is C37 or another version.
*C35, Caryatid, Düsseldorf. The kneeling caryatid in Düsseldorf has the same red-orange flesh and dark ground, but it kneels and carries a painted slab. The Aichi caryatid stands, and her load is implied
Caryatid, Centre Pompidou.** The Martigny 1990 list on the Secret Modigliani site includes "Cariatide v. 1913-1914 Huile sur carton Centre Pompidou, Paris" (no. 24). This is a painting on cardboard, which could be a relevant comparison for the support of C36, if the site's identification of cardboard is correct. I have not seen the Pompidou painting.

Provenance and exhibitions

The Secret Modigliani page gives a long provenance: Paul Guillaume, Paris; sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 3 March 1927; Poyet collection; Galerie Percier, Paris; Galleria del Milione, Milan; Antonio Verdirame, Milan; private collection, Tokyo; sale, Christie's, London, 28 March 1988; Bridgestone Museum of Art, Japan; Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art. The museum page I opened gives no provenance. The accession number, FO199600002000, appears to include the year 1996. If so, that would be the year of acquisition (my inference from the numbering, not a statement of the museum).
The Secret Modigliani page also lists exhibitions: Milan, 1946, no. 1; La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1947; Rome, 1955 and 1959; Basel, 1955; Munich, 1957; Milan, Palazzo Reale, 1958, no. 6; Tokyo and Kyoto, Seibu Gallery, 1968, no. 4; Düsseldorf and Zurich, 1991, no. 10; Lugano, 1999, no. 8; Buffalo, Fort Worth and Los Angeles, 2002–03, no. 2; Tokyo and Osaka, 2008, nos. 8 and 28. The page notes that several of these exhibitions describe the work as "oil on canvas" or as "oil on canvas marouflé on wood".

Discrepancies

  1. Dimensions. The museum gives 80.5 × 45.0 cm. The Secret Modigliani page gives 87.5 × 67 cm, and its list of Ceroni numbers gives 87.6 × 67 cm as the "correct size". Ceroni and R give 81 × 46 cm, and Pfannstiel 82 × 46 cm. The proportions of the reproduction on the Secret Modigliani page are about 0.55 (width over height). That matches 45/80.5 (0.56), not 67/87.5 (0.77). The 87.5 × 67 cm figure therefore cannot describe the painted image as reproduced. It may be the size of the frame or of the panel, but that is my conjecture.
  2. Medium. The museum gives "oil on canvas supported by panel". The Secret Modigliani page says "oil on cardboard?" and calls the "oil on canvas" of Ceroni, Patani, Parisot and Wayne, and MR's "oil on canvas marouflé on wood", incorrect. The museum's description is close to MR's. Without a technical examination, the museum's description should be preferred.
  3. Date. The dates range from 1910 (Milan 1958, according to the site) to 1913 (Ceroni). The museum gives 1911–13.
  4. Provenance. The site's provenance begins with Paul Guillaume and a Drouot sale on 3 March 1927. The same date is given on the Secret Modigliani page on C37 for the André Level sale at Drouot. Either both works were sold at Drouot on the same day, or one of the two entries is confused. I could not check.
  5. The museum's own text. The English summary says that physical and economic reasons stopped Modigliani's "artistic work". The Japanese text refers to sculpture (see "Iconography and models" above).

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 (2018) or the Tate Papers no. 35, where it appears only in a footnote to the study of the nudes.
Support. The museum's "oil on canvas supported by panel" suggests a canvas laid down on a rigid panel, which might be original or a later conservation measure. 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". It also says that this choice was "largely influenced by his precarious financial situation". The Nagoya Standing Nude (C34) is described by its museum as oil and watercolour on paper laid on board. The Pompidou Caryatid is described in the Martigny 1990 list as oil on cardboard. Whether the Aichi caryatid is on canvas, cardboard or paper can only be decided by examination.
Dimensions (comparative). The museum's dimensions, 80.5 × 45 cm, are close to those of C37 and C40. Comparative: the Tate Papers show that C40 was painted on a canvas cut from a larger canvas, and that "The dimension of the longer side, at 81 cm, corresponds to a no.25 format in the French system of standardised stretchers and canvases". If the Aichi canvas was also cut down, its tacking margins would show it.
Surface. The scratched lines in the black ground and the dry, rubbed surface would repay examination under magnification and ultraviolet light.
Pigments (comparative only). The orange-red of the figure may contain vermilion or iron oxide, or both. Comparative: in C40 the face contains "lead and zinc white, vermilion and an iron-based pigment". The dark ground might contain bone black, as in C40. These are only suggestions of what analysis might find.

Conclusion

The Aichi Caryatid is the most painterly of Ceroni's standing caryatids. Its hot orange-red figure, set against a black niche between walls of the same colour, has a vigour and roughness that the smoother C37 does not have. The tilted head and uneven arms give it the movement that the museum describes as an "S-curve". Its lines of dots belong to the ornament that the Jewish Museum traces to "ancient South and Southeast Asian sources". The museum's summary reads it as a sign of Modigliani's interest in "primitive sculpture", and of how that interest "influenced his bold depiction of the human forms".
The painting also illustrates how unreliable the published data can be. The dimensions on the Secret Modigliani page, 87.5 × 67 cm, do not match the proportions of the image reproduced there. The medium has been given as canvas, cardboard, canvas on wood and canvas on panel. The provenance has a date that also appears in the provenance of C37. Its unusual size, shared with C37 and C40, is a clue that only a technical study could follow.

 

Museum, auction and exhibition sources

  1. Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, collection database, Caryatid, accession no. FO199600002000 (English), https://jmapps.ne.jp/apmoa2/det.html?data_id=10012
  2. Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, collection database, カリアティード (Japanese), https://jmapps.ne.jp/apmoa/det.html?data_id=10012
  3. Christie's, London, Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale, 27 June 2017, sale 14239, lot 21, Cariatide (C37), https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6089492
  4. The Jewish Museum, New York, Modigliani Unmasked, large-print exhibition guide, https://thejewishmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Modigliani_Large_Print_FINAL.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
  2. 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
  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), 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 Christie's London catalogue of 28 March 1988 and any Bridgestone Museum documentation were not found online. The Aichi database gives no provenance, exhibition history or acquisition date. No exhibition catalogue listed above could be consulted.

Cited but not independently consulted

Milan, Associazione fra gli amatori e i cultori delle arti figurative contemporanee, exhibition catalogue, 1946; Carrieri, Modigliani, 12 opere, 1947, no. 1; Cahiers d'Art, 1950, p. 166; D'Ancona, 1952, p. 8; Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani, 1953, pl. 3, and 1954, p. 14 and pl. 12; Palazzo Reale, Milan, catalogue, 1953; Pfannstiel, 1956, no. 27; Russoli, 1958, pl. 2; Ceroni, 1958, no. 28; Werner, 1967, p. 72, 1968, p. 80, and 1985, pp. 58–59; Lanthemann, 1970, nos. 527 and 528; Ceroni and Piccioni, 1970, no. 36; Parisot, 1991, no. 1/1913; Patani, 1991–94, no. 41; Schmalenbach, Düsseldorf and Zurich catalogue, 1990, p. 63; Chiappini (ed.), Lugano catalogue, 1999; Wayne, Modigliani and the Artists of Montparnasse, 2002, p. 79; Modigliani: l'ange au visage grave, Musée du Luxembourg, 2002, p. 23, pl. 14, and p. 31, pl. 31; Fraquelli, "Modigliani, Fort Worth and Paris", The Burlington Magazine, 145 (2003), pp. 254–55; Soto Caba, 2007; the catalogues of the exhibitions listed above.

 

Footnotes

  1. Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani, 1884–1920, New York, 1954.
  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. Joseph Lanthemann, Modigliani, catalogue raisonné: sa vie, son œuvre, son art, Barcelona, G. Condal, 1970.
  6. Ambrogio Ceroni and Leone Piccioni, I dipinti di Modigliani, Milan, Rizzoli, 1970.
  7. Christian Parisot, Catalogue raisonné Modigliani, Livorno, Graphis Arte, 1991.
  8. Osvaldo Patani, Amedeo Modigliani: catalogo generale, Milan, Leonardo, 1991–94.
  9. Werner Schmalenbach, Amedeo Modigliani, Munich, Prestel, 1990.
  10. Kenneth Wayne, Modigliani and the Artists of Montparnasse, New York, Abrams / Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2002.
  11. MR (cited here as MR), Modigliani: l’ange au visage grave, Paris, Musée du Luxembourg, 2002. Cited from the published exhibition catalogue only.
  12. Victoria Soto Caba, Modigliani: The Timeless Face, Madrid, Libsa, 2007.