Description
The Red Head – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani
The Red Head is a Modigliani head of 1915 and, among our reproductions of famous paintings, one of the strangest on this shelf: a face alone, with no room around it, laid in brick red against a dark blue-green ground. The original is held by the Musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.
What is on the cardboard
We see a head and the suggestion of shoulders, and nothing else. Face and neck are laid in a strong brick red, brushed on in short visible strokes so that the blue-green underneath breathes through all the way. The face is asymmetric: the left eye is a dark closed slit, the right a pale white-blue patch under a black brow. The nose is narrow and wedge-shaped, the mouth small and orange. A black wedge of hair stands at the left of the head, and a thin black bar runs out from it towards the left edge. At the lower right a shoulder is sketched in with a few strokes. The ground is a single dark blue-green with no depth in it. The signature stands at the lower left.
How the museum reads this head
The museum’s own catalogue note places the work among the comparable heads of 1915 and beside the Portrait of Pablo Picasso of the same year. Its reading is specific and we give it as the museum’s: the violence of the blood-red colour is said to follow the Fauve chromatics of Matisse and Derain, while the morphology — a fine oval face, asymmetry, a wedge nose, closed eyes, a tiny mouth — is described as more or less inspired by Fang masks from Gabon. That, in the museum’s view, unrealises the head and lends it the enigmatic, magical presence of a tribal mask. This is the museum’s reading and not our claim; what we can confirm ourselves is that the face does behave like a mask rather than like a portrait of someone we could name. The museum names no sitter either.
The record of the original
The original is not on canvas but on cardboard: the museum gives the technique as huile sur carton, oil on cardboard, and it can be seen in the photograph, where bare unpainted support is left along the left and top edges. It measures 54 cm high and 42.5 cm wide; we give width first, so on our page it reads 42.5 x 54 cm, and the specification names the order in words as well. The museum writes the year in square brackets as [1915], meaning it is attributed rather than documented, so we say the museum dates it to 1915. The number is AM 4286 P, and the work was bought in 1964 at the sale of the André Lefèvre collection. The signature is at the lower left. The museum publishes nothing about ownership before 1964 and neither do we. Our own picture is oil on canvas in the proportions of the original — that difference of support is the one thing worth knowing.
What you receive
Our painter works the reproduction by hand, oil on canvas, at the size you choose. The subject is small at its original measurement but very strong in colour, so it carries a large enlargement well and works as a single accent on an otherwise quiet wall. It sits best against a neutral ground — a white, sand or light grey wall — where the red competes with nothing. Because it is a head without a setting, it also takes being close to and suits small rooms. When the canvas is finished we photograph it and send you the photograph for approval. You choose the frame in our 3D application, and our reproductions on canvas leave the atelier stretched and ready to hang. Every painting we make is hand-painted and never printed.
| Year of creation: | 1915 |
| Original size (width × height): | 42.5 x 54 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on cardboard |
| Located: | Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris (inv. AM 4286 P), purchased 1964 |
This shelf also carries the portraits of Moïse Kisling and of his wife — the same Paris years and the same circle, except that those two are faces with a name, and this head is not.
