Pamono After Amedeo Modigliani, Tête de Femme, Bronze Sculpture> Sculpture

Artist: Amedeo Modigliani (after)

Artwork: Tête de Femme (Head of a Woman)

Year of ideation: 1912 (conceived as a stone sculpture)

Year of production: 1998

Material: Bronze (lost wax), brown patina

Country of foundry: Italy

Foundry: Merighi, Bologna

Total edition: 8 (numbered 5/8)

Size: 54 cm ca high

Signature, foundry seal, and edition number out of 8 (5/8)

Provenance: private collection, Italy

with Original Certificate by Merighi Arte – Bologna

Amedeo Modigliani (1884 – 1920) was an Italian painter and sculptor of the École de Paris who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterised by a surreal elongation of faces, necks, and figures — works that were not received well during his lifetime, but later became much sought-after. Modigliani spent his youth in Italy, where he studied the art of antiquity and the Renaissance.
Modigliani was born into a rich Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno. from 1898 to 1900 he worked with Micheli, the best painting master in the city. In 1906 he moved to Paris and, in the next 14 years of his short life, befriended the best artists of his time: Chaïm Soutine, Moïse Kisling, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Marie “Marevna” Vorobyev-Stebeslka, Juan Gris, Max Jacob, Jacques Lipchitz, Blaise Cendrars, Foujita, Jean Cocteau and so on. In 1916, Modigliani befriended the Polish poet and art dealer Léopold Zborowski and his wife Anna. Zborowski became Modigliani’s primary art dealer and friend during the artist’s final years, helping him financially, and also organising his show in Paris in 1917.
The Paris show of 1917 was Modigliani’s only solo exhibition during his life, and is “notorious” in modern art history for its sensational public reception and the attendant issues of obscenity.The show was closed by police on its opening day, but continued thereafter, most likely after the removal of paintings from the gallery’s streetfront window.
In the spring of 1917, the Ukrainian sculptor Chana Orloff introduced him to a 19-year-old art student named Jeanne Hébuterne who had posed for Tsuguharu Foujita: soon they started living together.
Although he continued to paint until his last days, Modigliani’s health deteriorated rapidly, and his alcohol-induced blackouts became more frequent. In 1920, after not hearing from him for several days, a neighbour checked on the family and found Modigliani in bed delirious and holding onto Hébuterne. A doctor was summoned, but little could be done because Modigliani was in the final stage of his disease, tubercular meningitis. He died on 24 January 1920, at the Hôpital de la Charité.
The day after his death, Hébuterne, eight months pregnant with their second child, was taken to her parents’ home. There, inconsolable, she threw herself out of a fifth-floor window, killing herself and her unborn child.

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Fame and Sales

On 9 November 2015 the 1917 painting Nu couché, sold at Christie’s in New York for US$170.4 million. On 14 May 2018 the 1917 painting Nu couché (sur le côté gauche) sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $157.2 million. This was the highest auction price in Sotheby’s history.
A bronze similar to this, from the same edition by Merighi (numbered 1/8) has been sold at TGP auction in Switzerland on June 12th, 2022, lot 174, for 21,250 CHF