Nu couché – Amedeo Modigliani 60.0 x 92.0 cm

The painting is one of a famous series of nudes that Modigliani painted in 1917 under the patronage of his Polish dealer Léopold Zborowski. It is believed to have been included in Modigliani’s first and only art show in 1917, at the Galerie Berthe Weill, which was shut down by the police. Christie’s lot notes for their November 2015 sale of the painting observed that this group of nudes by Modigliani served to reaffirm and reinvigorate the nude as a subject of modernist art.

The Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones notes that Modigliani continues the tradition of Titian’s Venus of Urbino. That tradition of glorifying the human body infuses the sexuality of Modigliani’s nude, reinvented a decade before by the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Jones remarks that Modigliani was a religious artist and his religion was desire.