How are you?
Modigliani Institute Korea (MIK) is
currently introducing artworks of Amedeo Modigliani one by one every week.
The 36th work to introduce for this
week is “Red head woman (1915)”.
This work is a portrait of an
expressionist style and an oil painting on canvas with the size of 46 x 38 cm. It is currently owned by the Gallery
of Modern and Contemporary Art (GAM) in Turin, Italy. In this work, the signature
“Modigliani” is written in bottom right.
This work was donated to the GAM, from
the Thompson collection, via the Turin '61 Committee to commemorate the 100th
anniversary of Italian unification.
This work is almost entirely
painted using red-type colors. Therefore, it is a work that feels warm, but the
intensity of the warmth is excessive. However, the intensity of such colors
is somewhat softened by smoothly depicting the model with rounded outlines.
Modigliani is a painter who drew not
with imagination but with a real model. Thus, in the warmth that comes from
this work, the model in the work seems to have been a person of a warm character.
This work is a glimpse of the signs
of transitional phase on the process that Modigliani has his own definitive style,
and it illustrates the trouble and confusion of Modigliani trying to establish
his own style.
For examples, the soft outline of
the face, the earring and one eye show the traces of classical art he studied
before moving to Paris. On the other hand, there are signs
of trying to imitate Cubism in the shape of the nose and mouth, and in one eye.
In the case of the eye, one eye was
normally drawn, but the pupil in the other eye remains blurry, although he later
completely drew empty eyes without pupils, and the neck is still shorter than later
completely elongated neck. Therefore, it shows that Modigliani
is in the transitional phase of his established style. Perhaps it seems that Modigliani
struggled with the idea for completely eliminating pupils, and drawing the neck
longer.
In addition, Modigliani, who had
been a sculptor for several years and returned to a painter but still had some
regrets about sculpture, also left some traces of the sculpture in this work.
Many people think that Modigliani
was a painter who enjoyed freedom on the canvas, but he was a painter that made
detailed plan in advance for the perfect balance in composition and color for the
whole canvas.
This work also features a black
shadow on the background, like a portrait of Beatrice that I introduced before. Since the entire work has a reddish
color, it looks like a black smoke rising from behind, rather than a shadow.
If it is regarded as a shadow,
Modigliani completely ignored the laws of Chiaroscuro, which is one of the
techniques used in art, using strong contrasts between light and dark to
emphasize the shadow effect.
However, in the exhibition of Isola
& Norzi held by Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2012, they
announced the results of X-ray images about the possibility that little Louise
portrait was underneath the actual painting.
Based on the results of these X-ray
images, considering the distribution and shape of the black shadow in this
work, it seems to be the traces that Modigliani erased the portrait that was
originally painted on the canvas. In other words, it is not shadows
but the erased traces of the original painting.
This work also has holes in four
corners, and these holes indicate that the management of the work was neglected
after Modigliani drew it.
Thank you.
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