A nearly 100-year-old painting of an alluring nude created by the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani sold for $170.4 million on Monday night — the second-highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art.
Modigliani’s 1917-18 canvas “Nu Couché” is widely considered among his finest works. The painting was the “star lot” around which the New York auction house Christie’s built its “Artist’s Muse” auction on Monday, The New York Times reported.
Artnet News called it “pure, quintessential Modigliani,” with rich colors, “lush paint handling”and “pulsing eroticism.” It predicted earlier Monday that the painting could go for $100 million or more, in large part because it was Modigliani’s “best nude and perhaps his best painting ever.”
The painting sold in nine minutes with bids by five prospective buyers, a Christie’s spokesperson told CNN. The buyer was not immediately revealed.
At Monday’s auction, a 1964 painting by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, “Nurse,” also sold for slightly over $95.3 million, the Times reported.
“Nu Couché” becomes just the 10th in history to sell at auction for $100 million or more. The record belongs to Pablo Picasso’s “Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’),” a 1955 oil on canvas that sold for $179.4 million last May.
The ” Reclining Nude ” by Modigliani auctioned on November 9 , 2015. | Timothy A Clary/AFP
With the sale, Modigliani becomes just the sixth artist to enter the so-called $100 Million-at-Auction Club — its members include Picasso, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon,Alberto Giacometti and Edvard Munch, whose well-known 1895 pastel “The Scream” sold for $120 million at a Sotheby’s New York auction in 2012.
Modigliani’s output was small, Artnet noted: he died of tuberculosis in 1920, at age 35, having completed just 350 paintings in a largely unsuccessful career. By contrast, Picasso died at 91 and left thousands of works. Three Picassos have sold at auction for at least $100 million since 2004, the Times reported.
On Monday, Christie’s “Artist’s Muse” theme attracted a measure of skepticism — in addition to Modigliani’s nude, it also included the 1981 Warhol silk-screen painting, “Gun.”
“A Warhol ‘Gun’ painting? How was that his muse?” the New York dealer Henry Zimet asked the Times. “But if they can get away with it, good luck to them.”
