In the next auction in Milan of Modern and Contemporary Art on 6 July 2023 there will be a rare pencil on paper by Amedeo Modigliani of 1914 (lot 21, estimated 180,000 – 220,000 euros), which is part of a research of linearity and extraction that the artist Livorno had undertaken after seeing the refined path of synthesis to which he had accomplished the Romanian artist Costantin Brancusi when he came into contact with non-European cultures and protohistoric they had so fascinated Picasso, Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck for their disruptive expressiveness. Art Nègre is pure spirituality because beyond the elegance and the mere aesthetics, what strikes the artists of the avant-garde Parisian is the essence that hidden and rooted behind the shape and color of an art purified by any artifice.
The fragmented, everyday and fleeting image is the visual background of our contemporaneity, which multiplies perception and then manipulates and reproduces it in a sequence dilated in time and space. A process dear to Andy Wahrol and to the Pop Art that he had made, of the dilated reproducibility of the totems of mass consumption, an instrument of rupture towards an idea of art as history by images: “I ignore where the artificial ends and begins the real” is one of his famous phrases, a statement that apparently sanctioned the end of the artist’s function as a medium, and the affirmation of a testimony that chose the casual neutrality of everyday life. A serigraph of 1981 specimen ninth of a thirty print run portrays “Mammy” (lot 29, estimated 60,000 – 70,000 euros), tells of a smiling face caught in a gallery of Greenwich Village that like Marilyn and Mick Jagger lived the thrill of immortality, as time suspended between the usual and the myth.
21.AMEDEO MODIGLIANI (Livorno 1884 – Paris 1920) Untitled, c. 1914. Pencil on paper, 53 x 41 cm. Estimate € 180.000 – 220.000
29.ANDY WARHOL (Pittsburg 1928 – New York 1987) Mammy, 1981 Color screenprint on paper, 96.5 x 96.5 cm Signed and numbered lower left Copy 9/30. Estimate €60,000 – 70,000