Description
After studying art in Italy, Modigliani moved to Paris, where he met the dermatologist Paul Alexandre. Alexandre would become Modigliani’s first patron, who eventually amassed a large collection of the artist’s work. Even though Alexandre found sitting for a portrait exhausting, he became the subject for several works. In this study for an oil painting, Modigliani captured the salient features of the doctor’s face: the sharp part in his hair and his piercing stare.
Provenance
The artist to Paul Alexandre, Paris; by descent within the Alexandre family; sold, Sotheby’s, London, Dec. 8, 1999, lot 216, to Dorothy Braude Edinburg, Brookline, MA.; given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2013.
Accession Number
186313
Medium
Black fabricated chalk on cream wove paper
Dimensions
19.9 × 27 cm (7 7/8 × 10 11/16 in.)
Classification
prints and drawing
Credit Line
Gift of Dorothy Braude Edinburg to the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection
Background & Context
Background Story
This portrait of Dr. Paul Alexandre, executed in black fabricated chalk around 1909, captures the man who was Modiglianis earliest and most important patron during the artists first years in Paris. Alexandre, a young physician with avant-garde sympathies, met Modigliani in 1907 and immediately began supporting him, purchasing works, providing studio space, and introducing him to collectors and dealers. The portrait shows Alexandre with the elongated oval face and simplified features that Modigliani was developing in these years, before the more extreme elongations of his mature style. The black chalk medium allows for a range of tonal values from the lightest gray to deep black, and Modigliani exploits this to model the face with a sculptural three-dimensionality that reveals his concurrent engagement with carving. The intimacy of the drawing medium, its directness and lack of pretension, suits the relationship between artist and patron: there is no flattery, only an honest record of two young men who believed in the future of art.
Cultural Impact
The Alexandre portraits document the crucial early period of Modiglianis development when he was transforming from a conventional Salon artist into the modernist we recognize today. The collection Alexandre assembled, including this drawing, preserved evidence of Modiglianis formative years that would otherwise have been lost to the artists poverty and the destruction of early works.
Why It Matters
An intimate chalk portrait of Modiglianis first major patron Dr. Paul Alexandre, capturing both the sitters character and the artists transition toward his signature elongated style during a formative period in Paris.
