Modigliani nude fetches second-highest price ever paid for art at auction

Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani painting sold for a whooping $170 million

After a heated auction at Christie’s, a painting by Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani was sold for $170,405,000 on Monday. The painting is titled Nu Couché, and it has a nude lady lying on a red bed spread.

The sale was over in just nine minutes of bidding, and the winning bid came by telephone, which was well over the guaranteed price of $100 million.

How did the Modigliani painting fetch so much money?

Nu Couché was painted by Modigliani in circa 1917-18, and it was the main attraction of Christie’s “Artist Muse” auction this year. With collectors already concerned about the bubble in the art market for radical contemporary art, buyers have been on the constant lookout for some of the famous names from earlier periods. And that is why Modigliani’s nudes are considered as the ultimate painting of the 20th century.

Though a talented painter, Modigliani was always plagued by health problems and died from tubercular meningitis at the young age of 35. During the final stages of his illness, he painted Nu Couché, which means “Reclining Nude” in English. The painting was a part of a series of several dozen nudes which were shown in the only solo exhibition of the artist’s life. There was so much heated discussion over the obscenity in his paintings that police officers had to remove the paintings from the window display on the street front.

Only nine paintings in the world have been sold for more than $100 million, and Modigliani’s work definitely deserved to be there. Another painting by the artist, Paulette Jourdain, was sold for $42,810,000 at Sotheby’s last week.

The painting was bought by a Chinese taxi driver turned billionaire

On Tuesday, Liu Yiqian, a taxi driver turned billionaire art collector in China, confirmed that he was indeed the buyer of the nude painting by Amedeo Modigliani, which was sold on Monday night in Christie’s. He plans on bringing the painting back to Shanghai, where he and his wife own two private museums.

“We are planning to exhibit it for the museum’s fifth anniversary,” Yiqian said. “It will be an opportunity for Chinese art lovers to see good artworks without having to leave the country, which is one of the main reasons why we founded the museums.”

The 52-year-old art collector was one the six people bidding on Modigliani’s painting. His final bid for $170.4 million was unopposed, and Yiqian finally became the owner of this marvellous vintage painting.

“This work is relatively nice compared to his other nude paintings. And his nude paintings have been collected by some of the world’s top museums,” Liu said.

Liu owns two museums in Shanghai—the Long Museum in West Bund, which opened just last year, and the Long Museum in Pudong, which opened back in 2012. Both of these museums have a vast collection of both contemporary and traditional art. Liu’s wife Wang Wei is the director of both of these museums, and the couple are two of the flashiest and most prominent art collectors today.

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