Nu couché

Updated on Oct 24, 2023

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Year 1917 Location private collection Created 1917		Medium Oil on canvas Artist Amedeo Modigliani Period Expressionism

Dimensions 60 cm × 92 cm (24 in × 36 in) Amedeo Modigliani artwork Reclining Nude, Nude Sitting on a Divan, Gypsy Woman with Baby, Seated Algerian Almaiisa, Portrait Of Lunia Czechovska

World record amedeo modigliani s nu couch

Nu couché (also known in English as Red Nude or Reclining Nude) is a 1917 oil on canvas painting by the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. It is one of his most widely reproduced and exhibited paintings.

Nu couche ii

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.

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. 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 art critic Jonathan Jones notes that Modigliani continues the tradition of Titian's Venus of Urbino. That tradition of glorifying the human body infuses the sexuality of Modigliani's nude, reinvented a decade before by the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Jones remarks that Modigliani was a religious artist and his religion was desire.