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Descrizione : ◆ Amedeo Modigliani (Italian, 1884-1920) Head of a Girl pencil on paper signed (lower right) (43cm x 26.5cm (17in x 10 1/2in)) Provenance Christopher 'Kit' Wood Sold by the above to Lefevre Gallery, 6th March 1930 (stock number 447/29) Acquired from the above by R. K. Blair, 28th January 1932, and thence by family descent to current owner This delicate, beautiful drawing by Amedeo Modigliani has all the hallmarks of his unique style, with the mask-like face, large but blank almond eyes, the curve of the nose hinting at a Cubist change of viewpoint but not quite, everything described with clarity and a spareness entirely counterpoint to his chaotic, bohemian life. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that it was originally in the collection of another artist: the British painter Christopher ‘Kit’ Wood, who first visited Paris in 1920, just a few months after Modigliani himself had died tragically young, thereby cementing his legend as the enfant terrible of the Parisian avant-garde. Wood himself – tall, handsome, erudite, bisexual – was a perfect fit in bohemian circles and caught the eye of Antonio de Gandarillas, diplomat, patron and friend to many artists, who introduced Wood to everyone who was anyone in the art world. Wood the painter would have found Modigliani’s economy of line and the simplification of form into near abstraction as very close to what he himself was looking for in his art - a ‘modernist primitivism’ that was all the rage in European painting at the time. For Modigliani’s generation, the main inspiration was African art, particularly masks, in which they saw a connection to an underlying visual ‘truth’ that had long been obscured in Europe by technical facility and academic ‘naturalism’. In Modigliani, though, we also see hints of Europe’s oldest art, that fluid, blank quality of Cycladic figures, whose beauty speaks across the ages. In Head of a Girl, Modigliani’s model is both a contemporary Parisian ‘kiki’(with her bobbed hair and androgynous look) and mysterious goddess. Although Kit Wood is in many ways a very English artist – in 1928 he encountered the retired marine scrap merchant-turned-painter Alfred Wallis in the Cornish fishing town of St Ives, adding a layer of English folk vernacular to his ‘modernist primitivist’ style - a good many of his paintings were made in France, in Paris, where he was a regular visitor throughout the 1920s, and in Brittany, where he followed in Gauguin’s footsteps searching for a primitive authenticity a little closer to home. Whilst we don’t know exactly when Wood acquired the Modigliani, we do know that he sold it to his London dealer, Alex. Reid and Lefevre Gallery, in March 1930, less than six months before his own tragic, early death, aged 28, by suicide, whilst withdrawing from the drug habit he had acquired amongst the Parisian beau monde. The Lefevre Gallery was the place in London at the time to go for the latest word in contemporary European art (they had held an exhibition of Modigliani paintings in March 1929 and mounted a memorial exhibition of Wood’s work in 1932). That year they sold the present drawing to a private collector and it has remained in the same family ever since. Now it is once again on a gallery wall for everyone to see, allowing us to imagine what it was - the subtlety of Modigliani’s line, the mystery of his sitter’s expression and the timelessness of it all – that drew Kit Wood to it a century ago.
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