Sotheby’s London has added a significant late entry to its forthcoming sale of works from Joe Lewis’s collection. Nu assis au collier (Seated Nude with Necklace), painted by Amedeo Modigliani in 1917, will appear at auction for the first time in over thirty years, carrying an estimate of around £45 million. It joins a sale already notable for its School of London material and the Lucian Freud Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, and its arrival changes the character of the evening considerably.
The painting comes from a specific and well-documented moment. Modigliani made it in Montparnasse, in a small, poorly furnished room, during the First World War, in what is now understood as one of the most concentrated periods of his brief career. Only thirty to thirty-five of his three hundred or so paintings are nudes. This is one of them, and it is among the most charged. The woman sits with her eyes closed, one hand holding a coral necklace, the other resting in her lap. The pose is a private moment. Modigliani was not painting pornography, whatever the police who shut down his December 1917 solo show on its opening night apparently thought. He was doing something corruptible. This painting was displayed in the gallery’s window.
Amadeo Modigliani, Nu assis au collier (1917-18) Photo: courtesy of Sotheby’s.
That exhibition, the only solo show staged during his lifetime, is where this painting first appeared. Seven full nudes were shown. The show lasted one evening before the authorities intervened on indecency grounds. The works caused a scandal not because they were lewd but because they refused the distance that convention demanded between a nude and its viewer. Modigliani’s models looked back, or looked away, with the confidence of someone who didn’t need to look. They were not art historical archetypes. They were specific people in specific rooms, and the paintings made that specificity uncomfortable.
Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, has spoken about the work with the enthusiasm of someone who has long watched it from a distance. He draws a comparison with Picasso’s Le Rêve from 1931, noting the shared quality of witnessed privacy, and suggests these paintings carry a quasi-religious dimension drawn from quattrocento devotional painting. It is an interesting read and not implausible. Modigliani was soaked in Italian art history, and the elongation of his figures owes something to that tradition, however much his content departed from it.
The art-market context for this work is strong. Modigliani’s auction record stands at $170 million for Nu Couché from 1917 to 1918, sold at Christie’s in 2015. Sotheby’s set a new Paris auction record for the artist last October with Elvire en buste, which sold for €27 million. Barker notes that interest in Modigliani is arguably greater now than ever, a claim supported by Johnny Depp’s 2024 biographical film and Marc Restellini’s new catalogue raisonné, both of which have brought the artist back into wider public attention.
The model in Nu assis au collier appears in two other known works from 1917, Nu au collier at Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum and Nu aux yeux clos at the Guggenheim in New York. That triangulation gives the painting a context that isolated works lack, situating it within a specific period of sustained creative focus.
The Lewis sale takes place in London later this month. With Sleeping by the Lion Carpet at one end of the evening and this Modigliani now confirmed at the other, Sotheby’s has assembled a sale that will define the summer market.