Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani had a keen instinct for public taste. Most of the Modigliani pieces that come onto the market are post-1910 drawings and paintings.

Amedeo MODIGLIANI matured young as an artist and died before the age of forty. He was born in Livorno, and he trained there as well as in Florence and Venice. In his three years of study he came under the full influence of the Italian impressionist school of the Macchiaioli, as well as Cezanne and Van Gogh who he discovered at the Venice Biennale in 1903. Once he moved to Paris he began to experiment more widely, developing sombre paintings with heavy solid lines, and hand-carved sculptures inspired by African wood sculpture and Brancusi. It was not until 1914 that he started to produce the drawn-out portraits against neutral backgrounds and reclining nudes which made his name.

Artworks at auctions

His paintings rapidly appeared at auction, first in 1917 with two oil paintings from the Nonero collection, sold at Drouot in the midst of the war. Sales multiplied from 1925 when the collection of Francis Carco (critic and friend of Modigliani) was broken up at Bellier and Hessel. In the post-war years, his works began to appear in New York and London and by 1960, the market for Modigliani had definitively moved to the US. The number of Modigliani works seen at auction is limited, with paintings and sculptures accounting for around 15% of the lots. Watercolours and crayon drawings by the prolific artist represent 60% and regularly fetch EUR 10,000-100,000. Only around 30 sculptures and 400 oil paintings have ever been auctioned. The most sought after works date back to 1906-1920, when Modigliani devoted himself almost exclusively to portraits, having intuited that this would be his defining work. The rarest are from the period 1910-1913.
Today his most expensive painting is an oil (1917) entitled Nu assis sur un divan (La belle Romaine), which fetched USD15,250,000 on 11 November 1999 at Sotheby’s New York.

The market places

Although turnover fluctuates considerably depending on supply, the auction venue is usually the same.The US continues to dominate the market with a share of almost 91%. The United Kingdom and France rarely auction works over USD1 million. And German auction houses regularly knock down small prints for less than EUR 1,000. The main venues for drawings were London, Paris and Milan in 2002.

Buy or sell

Modigliani works are in short supply. Between 25 and 50 works (in all disciplines) are auctioned annually. This makes for a roller-coaster trend in prices — closely correlated with the quality of the lots going to auction — which can triple from one year to the next. 2000 was an exceptional year with high-quality lots at November’s auctions in New York: seven major paintings came up in two days, of which one, Fillette assise en robe (1918), fetched USD14.2 million at Sotheby’s. There have been no records since. La robe noire (estimated at USD9-12 million), the most famous painting on sale in 2003, failed to find a buyer. In proportion to the few lots put up for auction, the bought-in rate for Modigliani is high, 41% in 1999 and still above 25%. And, quite often, it is the same works coming back up for auction — hardly likely to whet the appetite of collectors.

Despite this, after a long period of stability, prices rose in 2002. Two large exhibitions highlighting the artist’s work boosted prices. First, “Modigliani and the Artists of Montparnasse” at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas and then at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until September 2003. Second “Modigliani: ange au visage grave” at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris from 23 October 2002 until 2 March 2003. Some previously-neglected works finally found a buyer last year. For example, Giovanotto dai Capelli rossi which fetched USD7.7m in 2002 had been bought in with a low estimate of USD5m in 2001. The heavy media interest in the artist is boosting his market and making it a good time to sell.

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