Amedeo Modigliani - Tête 1910-1912
Tête 1911-1912 73cm Stone
Sold for: USD 70,725 million
Auction house: Sotheby's, New York
Sale date: November 2014
Seller: Private Collection
Buyer: Anonymous bidder
From Sotheby's, New York:
Exceedingly rare, Modigliani's elegant stone carvings are among the most coveted works of modern art. While the majority these sculptures are in the collections of museums, the present work is the finest remaining in private hands. Tête that has the power to enthrall those who enter its realm. Created in the likeness of an ancient totem or deity, this magnificient carving was created in Modigliani's open-air studio at the Cité Falguière in Montparnasse. At night the artist would illuminate these sculptures by candlelight, creating a sacred space for his goddesses of stone. Those faced with the spectacle could not escape the power and allure of this beautiful figure. "The stone heads affected me strangely," confessed Augustus John, the British artist who purchased the present sculpture directly from Modigliani. "For some days afterwards I found myself under the hallucination of meeting people in the street who might have posed for them… Can ‘Modi’ have discovered a new and secret aspect of ‘reality’?" Even Modigliani was not immune to its transfixing effect. Jacques Lipchitz remembered that "Modigliani, when under the influence of hashish, embraced these sculptures." And Jacob Epstein, after visiting the studio one night when it was filled with nine or ten of these elongated heads, recalled that "when we had left him very late, he came running down the passage after us, calling us to come back like a frightened child" (quoted in Meryle Secrest, Modigliani, A Life, New York, 2011, p. 143). Such is the bewitching effect of Tête, a venerable idol of the avant-garde.