Amedeo Modigliani: ‘Nu couché (sur le côté gauche)’
Sotheby’s to auction a $150 million Modigliani On May 14th 2018, Sotheby’s will auction Amedeo Modigliani’s ‘Nu couché (sur le côté gauche)’, the largest painting of the artist’s career and the cover star of Tate Modern’s recent retrospective of the artist.]]>
April 27, 2018, source: Sotheby’s
“There is only one painter of the modern nude” – French poet and writer André Salmon on Modigliani.
Upon their debut exhibition in 1917, these striking and sensual images stopped traffic – quite literally – and prompted the police to close the show. Today, the series is recognized as one of the seminal achievements in Modern painting. The shock and awe that Modigliani’s nudes continue to elicit was evident most recently during Tate Modern’s celebrated retrospective of the artist’s work that included “Nu couché”.
The majority of the 22 reclining nudes from the series are found in museums, with particular depth in the United States: the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York each hold three examples. Outside of the United States, institutions with reclining nudes include the Long Museum in Shanghai and The Courtauld Gallery in London.
”Nu couché” was acquired by the present owner at auction in 2003 for $26.9 million. In 2015, another reclining nude from the series sold at auction for $170.4 million, at the time marking the second-highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction.
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Modigliani at Tate Modern (exhibition, 2017)
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