Nude with Coral Necklace

Amedeo Modigliani moved from his native Italy to Paris in 1906. He became known for the elongated faces and torsos of his sitters, and worked in both sculpture and painting, creating portraits of the many artists and writers who made Montmartre and Montparnasse their homes in the early years of the twentieth century.

This painting is among the more than two dozen female nudes Modigliani created in the last years of his life. It originally bore an inscription, "Modigliani / 3 Joseph Bara / Paris / 1917," indicating that it was among the works painted at the home of Modigliani's dealer, Léopold Zborowski, where the artist lived, worked, and was supplied with models and materials during 1917. His nudes are indebted to those of Titian and Giorgione, as well as Goya and Manet, but filtered through the artist's stylization of face and body, and absent many indi cations of setting.

In December 1917, Modigliani had his first and only one-man exhibition, organized by Zborowski and held at the Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris. It is not known whether the present work was in the exhibition, but it is extremely likely, as Zborowski owned it at the time. The police closed the show, as a handful of nudes on display were found to be obscene. Despite the artist's reductive, stylized forms, the depiction of nipples and pubic hair-as in this work, where the model boldly touches her genital area-certainly contributed to this sense of contemporary outrage and shock.

The work was once owned by the Parisian art critic, salesman, and anarchist Félix Fénéon, and was sold by the art dealer Pierre Matisse in 1950 to Joseph and Enid Bissett, who made their fortune through development of the Maidenform bra. The AMAM also has Head of a Man, painted by Modigliani around 1915-16, which, like the present work, was a gift of the Bissetts.