Madam Pompadour
À propos du tableau
Madame Pompadour est une peinture à l'huile sur toile de 61 × 50 cm réalisée en 1915 par le peintre italien Amedeo Modigliani.
Elle est conservée à l'Art Institute of Chicago.
Ce portrait est inspiré par Beatrice Hastings avec qui Modigliani entretient une relation amoureuse. Il est exposé pour la première fois en 1916 lors de l'exposition organisée par les peintres Moïse Kisling et Manuel Ortiz de Zárate dans l'atelier d'Émile Lejeune. Le surnom de « Madame Pompadour » lui a été donné car Beatrice Hastings portait souvent de grands chapeaux.
Selon le musée
Born of Jewish parents in the Italian coastal town of Leghorn, Amedeo Modigliani settled in Paris in 1906, where he developed friendships with Pablo Picasso , the poet Max Jacob, the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and other members of the literary and artistic avant-garde, many of whom appear in his portraits. He led a notoriously bohemian life, shortened by a self-destructive use of alcohol and drugs. Modigliani produced his finest paintings between 1914 and his premature death in 1920. Within a limited range of subjects, mainly portraits and nudes, he developed a highly distinctive style of sensitively elongated forms.
Lire la suite
In this portrait, Modigliani's emphasis is on a strong formal structure dominated by the grid in the background and the echoing curves of the sitter's hat, shoulders, and features. There is none of the pathos often associated with his work. The artist seems instead to have invested this portrait with a note of ironic detachment, even humor, reflected in both the title of the painting (which refers to Madame de Pompadour, mistress of King Louis XV of France) and the expression of amused inscrutability worn by the sitter. Were painter and sitter perhaps both amused by the flamboyant hat? Modigliani's skill in rhyming forms, while at the same time keeping us visually interested and slightly off-balance, is evident throughout the picture, which resonates with the lessons of Paul Cezanne, Cubism, and African sculpture.
Pendant ce temps, chez Amedeo Modigliani
La vie entièreby 1914
Gives up sculpture for painting
By 1914 Modigliani abandons sculpting and focuses solely on painting, a move precipitated by the difficulty of acquiring sculptural materials once the war breaks out, and by his physical debilitation.
1914
Paul Guillaume replaces Paul Alexandre
Paul Alexandre, called up into the army, terminates his contract with the artist, and Modigliani’s new patron becomes the gallery owner and collector Paul Guillaume, who exhibits his work in his gallery.
June 1914
Beatrice Hastings
Modigliani meets the talented and eccentric Englishwoman Beatrice Hastings, a poet and columnist for The New Age, who becomes his companion, muse and favourite model: he devotes 14 portraits to her. The relationship lasts about two years.
1916
Léopold Zborowski, friend and dealer
Modigliani befriends the Polish poet and art dealer Léopold Zborowski and his wife Anna; in the artist’s final years Zborowski is his primary dealer and friend. He lends Modigliani his apartment, supplies models and painting materials, and pays him between fifteen and twenty francs a day.
spring 1917
Meets Jeanne Hébuterne
In the spring of 1917 the Ukrainian sculptor Chana Orloff introduces Modigliani to a 19-year-old art student, Jeanne Hébuterne, who has posed for Foujita. Her conservative, devoutly Catholic family renounces her for her liaison with a Jew, but she soon lives with Modigliani anyway and becomes a principal subject of his art.
