Early Days of Experimentation

After an academic exposure to art in Italy, Modigliani moved to Paris at twenty-one years old. Greeted by the work of different artists, classic and contemporary, he explored and experimented with new ways of working, inspired by Cézanne, Munch, and Picasso.

In his first years in Paris, Modigliani kept reusing older canvases for painting. Sometimes he would cover up his previous attempts; sometimes it would be over other artists’ work.

The Pretty Housewife is a good example. At first sight, it’s a simple portrait of a young blond woman before a usual background that’s somewhat constrained by the narrow vertical canvas. But the X-radiograph and the busy and confusing shapes revealed show that the portrait is obscuring at least two other paintings.

X-radiography, an imaging technique using X-rays and popular in the medical field, reveals the varying densities of materials in an artifact, for example the thickness of paint in a painting. Materials with heavy elements such as lead paint or metal tools will absorb more X-ray radiation, while materials with lighter elements such as ultramarine paint or ungrounded canvasses will be kept in the dark. This reveals valuable information about an artifact’s construction or, in this case, how a painting was made.

Throughout the works of Modigliani, the team of scholars made use of X-radiography to characterize types of ground and paint layers, canvases and other structural elements used, as well as to understand how paint was applied and to identify restoration efforts.

When it comes to The Pretty Housewife, indepth analysis of the open-weave support that’s been primed with an oil-based lead white ground suggested that this portrait was the second or third painting on the canvas and that Modigliani made use of the underlying coloring, resulting in the final painting’s chromatic and textural complexity. His decision of reusing the canvas in this case is unclear.

Research on his paintings suggest that Modigliani’s practice of reusing canvases was not only because of Modigliani’s financial constraints but also because he enjoyed using older canvases and made use of the underlying colors and texture to enhance the new work.

Nudes and Colored

Priming

Around World War I, Modigliani had a dealer that provided him with canvases, which marked a shift in the artist’s focus on portraits. Particularly, these canvasses had a blue-gray priming, which gave his portraits and nudes a warm glow that complimented the flesh tones, which can be seen in Reclining Nude from the Back presented with its X-radiograph and infrared reflectograph.

Another valuable tool used by conservationists and art scholars, infrared reflectography (IRR) is another imaging technique used to reveal hidden underdrawings under the brush strokes. Light in the short-wave infrared region (1000–2500 nm) bypasses the layers of paint and is absorbed by carbon-containing materials like graphite or charcoal.

The graphite underdrawings for the Reclining Nude from the Back, highlighted in red, is revealed using white (basic lead carbonate) confirmed with Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy, applied on the ground layer. It looks like Modigliani applied some marks with charcoal to position the legs and arms as well as some facial features. The bending amount of the figure’s right arm was also initially decided but was later moved closer to the torso, as the underdrawing shows. And the X-radiograph helps us see that the ground paint was applied with a spatula or a similar tool, as indicated by the sweeping arched lines.