?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
AMEDEO MODIGLIANI Gaston Longchamp.
Pencil on cream wove paper, circa 1914. 370x280 mm; 14 1/2x11 inches. Ex-collection Gaston Longchamp, acquired directly from the artist; Renee Friedman, New York, wife of the artist Arnold Friedman; Rufus Rhodes, New York; thence by descent to the current owner.
Longchamp (circa 1894-1986) was born in the United States to a Cayuga-Iroquois father and French mother. Haunted by the 1890 Sioux massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, Longchamp's father, also an artist, moved his family to Paris in the early 1900s. Gaston became an apprentice in his father's Paris studio and, by the early 1910s, was ensconced in the Parisian avant garde art scene: he assisted Picasso with his set designs for the Russian Ballet in 1911 and contributed to Chagall's designs for Stravinsky's Firebird.
According to two hand-written letters by Longchamp from 1965 which accompany the drawing, Modigiliani presented him with this drawing in early 1914 at the Café de la Rotonde--a popular hangout for Parisian artists such as Picasso and Modigliani--in what was then the center of the avant garde in Montparnasse. Max Jacob was also present at the time, Longchamp recalls. He later gifted the drawing to Renee Friedman who, he laments in his letters, decided to ultimately sell the work. Longchamp returned to the United States in the 1920s, eventually settling as an artist and designer in rural Upper Bucks County, PA, where he died in relative obscurity in 1986.
