Author
Amedeo Modigliani
Movement / period
School of Paris
Technique
oil on canvas
Where it is
Private collection
In 2015 one of Modigliani's reclining nudes sold for $170.4 million — one of the highest auction prices ever paid for a painting.
Highlights
Facts & legends
- Police shut Modigliani's only lifetime solo show in 1917 over the nudes in the window.
- In 2015 one Reclining Nude sold for $170.4 million — one of the priciest canvases ever.
- He borrowed the elongated faces and blank eyes from African masks and sculpture.
- Modigliani lived only 35 years and died poor of tubercular meningitis.
- His partner Jeanne took her own life the day after his death — a tragedy now part of the legend.
Estimated value
What it is worth today
One of Modigliani's Reclining Nudes sold for $170.4 million in 2015 — one of the priciest canvases ever; it is in a private collection.
More details How a dealer paid for models and materials for Modigliani's audacious series, why police closed his only lifetime solo exhibition, and how a picture with almost no market in 1917 became a record a century later.
It belongs to a concentrated series
Zborowski financed roughly thirty nudes
From 1917 the Polish émigré dealer Léopold Zborowski paid for studio, materials, and models. Modigliani produced about thirty large nudes in an intense campaign.
No mythological Venus excuses the nakedness. A modern model occupies a confined interior and meets the viewer's gaze; the classical pose remains while allegorical distance disappears.
The canvas is modest—59.9 by 92 centimetres—but tight cropping makes the body exceed its actual format. The model's identity is not securely known, unlike many portraits of Modigliani's friends. Zborowski hired professional models, so the gaze need not reveal a private biography; it changes the familiar contract between nude and viewer. She neither pretends to sleep nor looks away.
The body exceeds the frame
Cropping intensifies presence
Elbows and legs pass beyond the canvas as the diagonal body presses toward its corners. Warm flesh separates sharply from red cushion and dark ground.
Elongated contours recall Modigliani's earlier sculpture, yet stylisation does not erase agency. The model looks calm, aware, and unapologetically present.
The pose recalls the long line of reclining Venuses from Titian to Goya and Manet, but Modigliani removes servants, landscape, mythological attribute, and elaborate interior. Red fabric, dark ground, and continuous contour remain. The curve of the hip answers the shoulder, while cropped limbs force the imagination beyond the canvas. The picture is intimate and monumental at once: a nearby body built as a complete sign.
Police closed the exhibition
The scandal began in the shop window
Berthe Weill organised Modigliani's first and only lifetime solo show in December 1917. A nude displayed in the window drew a street crowd and attention from the police station opposite.
The works were ordered down as indecent. The story sounds like instant fame, but the exhibition brought almost no sales and did not rescue the artist from poverty.
The episode is known chiefly through Berthe Weill's later account: a police commissioner demanded that the nudes leave the window, effectively ending the opening-day display. Documents do not securely identify this particular canvas as the one seen from the street. It is more accurate to say that scandal surrounded the series and exhibition. The qualification preserves real censorship while separating it from an overly precise museum legend.
The series was painted during war
A life-affirming body emerged in a dark year
Modigliani worked through the winter of 1917–18 as war continued and his health declined. Saturated red, strong contour, and an open pose resist the surrounding deprivation.
The canvas balances physical immediacy and strict design. It is neither merely a portrait nor an ideal: its force lies between intimacy and rhythmic form.
Tsuguharu Foujita later recalled Modigliani working feverishly in a poorly furnished room with model, couch, two chairs, and a bottle of brandy. This is a contemporary recollection, not a transcript of this specific sitting, but it conveys the series' speed. Rapid execution was not accidental: smooth colour and long contour rested on years of drawing and the stone-carving experience Modigliani abandoned because of health and expense.
Auction history reversed the lifetime story
Long Museum paid $170.405 million in 2015
Modigliani died in 1920 aged thirty-five with little financial success. Demand rose after his death. At its first auction appearance in November 2015, seven bidders drove Nu couche to $170,405,000 at Christie's.
Shanghai's Long Museum bought it. The record cannot undo poverty, but it marks a striking reversal: what police removed from a window became a global museum trophy.
Provenance traces a private object becoming a global symbol: from Zborowski it passed to Jonas Netter, then Riccardo Gualino, Pietro Feroldi, and Gianni Mattioli, remaining in the family for decades. The 2015 sale was its first auction appearance; seven bidders carried it to $170.405 million including premium. Long Museum acquired not a generic nude but a painting with nearly a century of recorded ownership and exhibition history.
Official sources
Where to check
- Nu couché: dimensions, date, provenance, and bibliographyChristie's
- 2015 auction result and Long Museum purchaseChristie's
- Series, wartime context, and Foujita's recollectionChristie's
- Zborowski and the series of nudesChristie's
- Modigliani exhibition and the modern nudeTate
- Modigliani exhibition catalogueTate Publishing
Visual context
