''Nu couché'' (also known in English as ''Red Nude'' or ''Reclining Nude'') is a 1917

oil on canvas Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest o ...

painting by the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. It is one of his most widely reproduced and exhibited paintings.

2015 sale

The painting realized $170,405,000 at a Christie's New York sale on 9 November 2015, a record for a Modigliani painting and placing it high among the most expensive paintings ever sold. The purchaser was the Chinese businessman

Liu Yiqian Liu Yiqian (, pronounced , born 1963) is a Chinese billionaire investor and art collector. An autodidact who formerly worked as a taxi driver, he has built his fortune since the mid-1980s by investing in stock trading, real estateNRC Handelsblad ...

. Liu is believed to have paid for the painting using his American Express card.

Painting

The painting is one of a famous series of nudes that Modigliani painted in 1917 under the patronage of his Polish dealer

Léopold Zborowski Léopold Zborowski (1889–1932) was a Polish poet, writer and art dealer. He was born in Zaleszczyki into a Jewish family. Zborowski and his wife Anna (Hanka Zborowska) were contemporaries with Parisian artists such as Chaïm Soutine, André De ...

. It is believed to have been included in Modigliani's first and only art show in 1917, at the Galerie Berthe Weill, which was shut down by the police. Christie's lot notes for their November 2015 sale of the painting observed that this group of nudes by Modigliani served to reaffirm and reinvigorate the nude as a subject of modernist art.

Commentary

* ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'' art critic Jonathan Jones notes that Modigliani continues the tradition of Titian's ''

Venus of Urbino The ''Venus of Urbino'' (also known as ''Reclining Venus'') is an oil painting by the Italian painter Titian, which seems to have been begun in 1532 or 1534, and was perhaps completed in 1534, but not sold until 1538. It depicts a nude young wom ...

''. That tradition of glorifying the human body infuses the sexuality of Modigliani's nude, reinvented a decade before by the paintings of

Pablo Picasso Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...

and

Henri Matisse Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a drawing, draughtsman, printmaking, printmaker, and sculptur ...

. Jones remarks that Modigliani was a religious artist and his religion was desire.

Provenance

, Paris. * Jonas Netter, Paris. * Riccardo and Cesarina Gualino, Turin (acquired in Paris, 2 October 1928). * Società Anonima Finanziaria, Zaccaria Pisa, Milan; collection sale, Galleria Pesaro, Milan, 5–8 February 1934, lot 185. * Pietro Feroldi, Brescia (by 1935). * Gianni Mattioli, Milan (acquired from the above, 1949) * by descent to Laura Mattioli Rossi (1977) *

, Shanghai, 2015 (sold at Christie's, New York, 9 November 2015 for $170,405,000).

References

External links

Christie's video

''Nu Couché'' by Modigliani
, Check123- Video Encyclopedia
The creation of the modern ''Olympia'' — from Courbet to Freud
Christie's article on the three nudes, by

Courbet Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet ( , , ; 10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and t ...