Modigliani Bust Statue - Red Woman with Oceanic Influence | Parastone

The Red Figure: Modigliani Between Africa and Oceania

This Modigliani Bust Statue reproduces the 1913 oil painting Le grand buste rouge, one of Modigliani's most striking female figures from his early Paris period. The deep red palette, the curving, elongated torso, and the simplified facial features mark a shift in his visual language - moving away from the angular geometry of African masks toward the organic, swelling forms he found in Oceanic sculpture.

While his stone heads from 1910 to 1912 compress their forms into vertical lines, this Modigliani bust statue opens outward. The shoulders curve, the torso broadens, the surface feels inhabited. Parastone's reproduction captures those volumes in red-finished resin and imagines the back view of the female figure.

• Material: Collectible resin, red finish
• Dimensions: 6.75 in. H x 3.5 in. W x 2 in. D
• Product Number: MO14, Amedeo Modigliani sculpture
• Collection: Parastone Mouseion Collection
• Included: Description card in four languages
• View the full Modigliani Sculpture Collection
• Modern Art Sculpture Collection

Oceanic Influence on the Modigliani Bust Statue

The Musee d'Ethnographie du Trocadero in Paris held one of the largest collections of Oceanic and African objects in Europe during Modigliani's years there. Where African masks gave his stone heads their frontal symmetry and carved-in stillness, Oceanic sculpture - particularly from Melanesia and Polynesia - offered something different: rounder volumes, more organic surfaces, figures that curve and expand rather than contract into geometry. Le grand buste rouge shows that shift. The forms are generous and rounded. The face retains his characteristic almond eyes and straight nose, but the body has a different weight than anything in his stone head series.

Le grand buste rouge: The 1913 Painting

By 1913, Modigliani had largely stepped back from stone carving and was painting full-time. Le grand buste rouge belongs to a series of female figures he produced during this transition - oil paintings that carried the formal lessons of his sculpture directly into paint. The elongated neck, the tilted oval head, the half-closed eyes: these were already established in his carved work. In this painting, they meet a warm red ground and a more expansive treatment of the female form. The Parastone Modigliani bust statue brings those painted volumes into three dimensions.

Amedeo Modigliani: Italian Painter in Paris

Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) was born in Livorno, Italy, and trained in Florence and Venice before moving to Paris in 1906. He absorbed the Post-Impressionist environment around him but developed a style that bore little resemblance to his contemporaries'. His primary sources were non-Western - African masks, Oceanic figurines, and ancient Mediterranean sculpture - filtered through a sensibility formed by early Italian painting. He died in Paris in 1920 at 35, leaving a body of work largely undervalued in his lifetime.

Display

This Modigliani bust statue is self-supporting on any flat surface. At 6.75 in. H x 3.5 in. W, it reads well on a shelf, mantle, or desk where the full front of the figure is visible. Dust occasionally with a dry cloth.

For More Reading

• Burlington Magazine - Modigliani Technical Research Study
• EBSCO Research Starters - Amedeo Modigliani
• ArtRewards - Amedeo Modigliani: Life, Passion, and Tragedy