VENICE.- The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s collections have been enhanced by the acquisition of a rare oil on canvas by Amedeo Modigliani: Woman in a Sailor Shirt (La femme en blouse marine), of 1916. This was a testamentary bequest of the Venetian collector Luisa Toso.
The canvas will first be exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on June after examination and conservation by the conservator at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Luciano Pensabene Buemi, who in recent years has also carried out the cleaning of paintings at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection by Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso. EFG, Institutional Patron of the museum, enthusiastically adopted and funded the project, given the painting’s historic and artistic importance to Italian culture. A thick layer of non-original varnish, both oxidized and yellowed, was removed. It had been applied during a prior restoration intervention which however altered the color tones, obscuring the cold, blue and gray tones as well as the peach-colored face which had deteriorated to beige. The colors have returned to the original, subtle diversity, the oxidation and whitening visible on several parts of the canvas have been removed.
Woman in a Sailor Shirt will augment the artistic patrimony of Venice with a small masterpiece, in line with the wishes of the donor. It joins three other, later paintings (1917-18) by Modigliani, nicknamed “Modì” (a pun on the French maudit or “cursed”), in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation collection.
The young woman who is the sitter, with bobbed black hair accentuating her oval face, is unknown. Both the background and her clothing are in dark tones, projecting her warm pink face forwards. The same sitter appears in another portrait by Modigliani of the same year, La servetta seduta (The seated servant girl). The shade of the dress suggests winter, especially since the ‘marinière,’ or “French Riviera Style,” which was adopted by the children of upper-class Parisians and Londoners who visited the Côte d’Azur, was characterized by its light colors. The mild androgyny and abstraction of the figure exemplify Modigliani’s constant need to transfer the unconscious, and the mystery of human instinct onto canvas. The anatomical elongation which, beginning in the second half of the 1910s, characterizes his work, is indicative of his previous experience as a sculptor, and of the influence then of African and Oriental art. The canvas, with the title La femme en blouse marine, was exhibited in the artist’s solo show, organized in December 1917 by his dealer Léopold Zborowski at the Parisian gallery of Berthe Weill. Paintings of female nudes in the window caused a scandal, and the show closed prematurely. In 1917, the painting was bought by Paul Guillaume and shown only rarely after this, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Bruxelles in 1933 and at Kunsthalle Basel in 1934, before entering the Toso collection in Venice in 1952. Since that time, it has been exhibited in Milan, Rome, Padua, Verona, Venice, Ancona, Caserta, and Turin, and the Italian State has listed the Toso Modigliani in recognition of its high artistic and historic value.
In 2016 EFG supported the conservation of Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece The Studio (L’Atelier) in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and continues its support with this important conservation intervention.
With this project EFG reaffirms its support of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection of Venice. The collaboration began in 2001 with the bank BSI, now acquired by and incorporated into EFG, the international banking group specialized in private banking and asset management. With this conservation project, EFG consolidates the collaboration, signaling that its support of art is not only through its collection of contemporary art but also through its participation in specific projects that cultivate and advance the growth of a community’s cultural patrimony
